by James Flint
‘Hi.’
She was standing on the landing dressed in boots, jeans and a pointed Peruvian hat with long flaps that hung down over her ears, her hands in the pockets of a sheepskin body warmer.
Matthew watched her as she floated towards the cat carrier and bent down to get a better look inside. As her features loomed before the little mesh doorway Max stopped his yowling, licked around his teeth and blinked. Could she charm animals, as well?
‘Hey kitty. Oh – he’s only got one eye.’
‘Yeah – I think he lost the other one to cat flu. But that was before I met him.’
‘Poor thing.’
‘It’s tough about your dad,’ Matthew said.
‘Yep. It is a bit.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I was going to go for a walk. I told Margaret I’d give the dogs a run.’
Matthew remembered the joint in his pocket.
‘I was thinking of doing that too. Could use some fresh air.’
‘Do you want to come?’
‘Do you want me to?’
She shrugged.
‘I’d better sort Max out first.’
‘Max?’
Matthew lifted the cat box. ‘He needs a litter tray. It’ll just take me a minute. See you out the front in a sec.’
—————
They went up the garden, through the back gate, and took the path that led round the edge of the wood, a route they’d last taken together some sixteen years earlier.
‘I always thought they were a bit scary, these woods,’ Caitlin said, as they came up over a rise that afforded a good view of the hillside, with its dense carapace of trees. ‘Not like the ones near Round Hill.’
‘They always seemed pretty friendly to me,’ Matthew grumped. ‘They used to frighten Emily though. Me and Alex left her alone in them one night, when we were camping together.’
‘You never told me that.’
‘I was embarrassed afterwards. About how mean it was. I don’t think she’s ever forgiven us.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
They walked on a little farther, following a sheep track that wound between tussocks of grass shaped like giant emerald anemones, past a hawthorn hedge and a badger sett. The air was still and cold, undisturbed by birds or insects, the track beneath their feet baked hard by frost, the dogs running ahead of them, darting from scent to scent.
‘It’s very old, you know, this wood. That’s why it’s got such an atmosphere. People reckon that it’s one of the few remaining pockets of the old Forest of Arden. You know, in Shakespeare’s time a squirrel could cross from one side of the county to the other without ever touching the ground.’
Caitlin smirked. ‘Dad used to shoot squirrels.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, he hated them. When I was little he used to call them “tree-rats”. He had this air-rifle, and if he saw them in the garden he’d take pot shots at them out of his bedroom window.’
‘So much for Tony the Tree-Hugger.’
‘You mean his planting project?’ Caitlin laughed. ‘Yeah, the squirrel-shooting doesn’t exactly fit well with that. Though I don’t think he ever actually hit one. He had a rubbish aim. It’s got quite big, you know, his forest. Loads of farmland all round where we live is fenced off for saplings now. I think he was even buying fields up over this way.’
‘Well he’s got a long way to go if he’s trying to recreate the Forest of Arden. It used to go all the way up to Tamworth.’ Matthew caught himself. ‘Oh – I meant “had”. “Had” a long way to go. Sorry. That was thoughtless.’
‘It’s okay. I still haven’t quite got my head round the fact he’s gone.’
‘Why do they need to fence the trees in?’ Matthew asked, keen to move the conversation forward.
‘It’s the deer. They strip the bark off the saplings and kill them otherwise. Trouble is that the areas are so big and the fences take so long to erect that the deer end up getting fenced in. So then they have to get all these blokes to come and chase them out again. It’s quite a hassle.’
‘Sounds it. I’m surprised they don’t just shoot them.’
He meant it cynically, but Caitlin didn’t take it that way. ‘They do, sometimes, but there are quite strict rules about culling. It all has to be done by the book.’
Matthew reached into the zippered breast pocket of his jacket and produced the joint, which he lit and passed it to Caitlin. The two of them walked on around the edge of the field, passing it backwards and forwards in silence.
‘You’re in telly, these days, aren’t you?’ Matthew asked, at length, hauling himself back from thoughts of the past.
‘Sort of.’
‘We’ve been trying to get someone to make a documentary about one of our EcoPath projects.’
‘How have you got on?’
‘I’ve been to see people at a few production companies.’
‘And?’
‘It’s extraordinary. The environment is front-page news these days. But unless it’s got a celebrity attached or you can get sex in the title, no one wants to know.’
‘Sex, fame and property. That’s what it’s all about.’
‘The whole thing’s been a colossal waste of time. This one guy, I went in to see him, and do you know what he said? He just glanced at first page of the outline and said, “Oh yeah, global warming, we’ve had hundreds of pitches like this the last couple of years. They’re like confetti.”’
‘That’s encouraging.’
‘So I said, well, if there’s so much interest in the subject, why didn’t you make any of them?’
Caitlin smiled. ‘I bet he liked that. What did he say?’
‘I don’t know. I’d already walked out.’
‘Brilliant. You’re going to go far in telly, Matthew. I can tell.’
They both grinned and the ice between them melted slightly. Smoke caught in Caitlin’s lungs; she banged a fist on her chest. ‘Nice weed.’
‘Thanks. I grow it in my kitchen cupboard.’
‘Yeah?’
‘You just need a light and some nutrients,’ Matthew explained. ‘You can get them off the web.’ But Caitlin didn’t really care and neither, in truth, did he. ‘Why d’you never get in touch?’ he said instead.
‘Don’t ask me that.’
‘But why?’
‘You know what it’s like.’
‘But you could’ve done.’
‘Then maybe I didn’t want to.’
The joint was dead. Matthew pinched it out and tucked the roach into the pocket of his coat.
‘It’s good to see you,’ he said.
Her expression didn’t change. Her eyes. Her glass-green eyes. No one else had eyes like that.
‘I miss you,’ he probed.
‘I can tell.’
‘Caitlin …’
‘Please don’t, Matthew. I don’t want to drag it all up again. It was painful enough the first time.’
‘Then why are you here? Why are you staying with us? You must’ve known I’d come back. And Alex, too. Why did you even want me to come on this walk with you?’
‘I didn’t – you asked …’
‘Oh come on!’
‘I don’t know, Matthew, I don’t know what you want from me—’
She had turned away from him and he grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back around.
‘I’ll tell you what I want. I want to know. I want you to tell me who it was. Call me stupid, but I thought that’s maybe why you’d come to see us. That maybe now your father was dead you could actually bring yourself to tell me.’
‘Don’t touch me! Do you think I need this? Right now? Do you?’
‘Who?’
Caitlin stared at him, but she said nothing.
‘It was Alex, wasn’t it? That night he took you home. It was my fucking brother.’ He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. ‘Wasn’t it?’
‘Leave me alone!’ She wrenched free of his grasp and
strode off down the hillside.
‘It was Alex!’ he yelled at her retreating form, willing her to stop and turn. ‘Wasn’t it?’
But she just kept walking away.
—————
When Caitlin got back to the house, sixty thousand pounds’ worth of Range Rover was sitting in the driveway plump and smug as a carved stone lion, and lunch was about to be served.
‘Hi! Just in time,’ chimed Alex as they walked into the kitchen. ‘Caitlin – you remember Mia, don’t you? And this little guy is Rufus.’
Mia hopped to her feet and sashayed forward in her hipsters, describing sine waves with her pretty white pumps.
‘Hi Caitlin.’ She chanced a smile. ‘It’s been a while.’
‘It has.’
‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’
‘Thanks.’
A silence followed, conveniently broken by Matthew coming through the back door and bringing the dogs in with him. As always Harry and Pandora transformed the scene, and suddenly there was much noise and activity.
‘Come on, let’s eat!’ bellowed Miles, and grabbing a dish of roast potatoes from the side of the Aga and the bottle of Costières de Nîmes he’d opened an hour earlier to breathe, he led the way through to the dining room.
Despite Miles’s effusive bonhomie, lunch was a quiet affair. Neither Caitlin nor Matthew said a word while the pork was carved and eaten, and Emily and Alex weren’t too chatty either. Fortunately Mia was in a voluble mood, and prattled on happily about London life, and Rufus’s new nursery, and how the architect they’d used for their renovation was now quite the rising star.
‘He’s building an amazing roof conversion over in Hoxton for Freddie Winston,’ she told no one in particular.
‘Isn’t Hoxton a slum area?’ Margaret frowned, the memory of a magazine article from the early 1980s faintly glimmering in her brain.
‘Oh it used to be, but now it’s very fashionable. I mean, loads of advertising agencies are opening there now, and lots of finance people live there because it’s close to the City. And so there’s plenty of nice shops and cafés.’ She’d chosen ‘nice’ over ‘cool’ and ‘cafés’ over ‘clubs’ so that Margaret would better understand, not just because she and Alex hadn’t actually been out clubbing since Rufus had been born. ‘And there are some great properties. Freddie bought the top floor of this incredible old factory and has had the whole roof taken off and reinforced. He’s having a pool and a dining pavilion built up there. It’s absolutely amazing. The pool is going to be see-through, so if you’re on the next floor down you can watch people swimming like in – what’s that aquarium we went to, Alex?’
‘Monterey.’
‘In Monterey, that’s it. And next to it, above it I mean, on the top, there’s this pavilion which is going to be a pool house and hang-out most of the time, but if you flick a switch a dining table with chairs will rise up from the floor.’
‘Wow,’ Matthew said, finally hearing something he judged worthy of his comment. ‘That’s useful.’
‘Now, now, Matthew, that’s enough,’ Miles said.
‘But—’
‘Matthew!’ snapped Margaret, in a far sharper tone than her husband’s. Knowing that resistance was futile, Matthew sat back in his seat and reached for his wine.
Sublime, unruffled, Miles began a fresh conversational strand. ‘I don’t want to discuss your father if it will upset you, Caitlin, but did you know that just before he died he bought the wood at the back of this house?’
‘What, where we walked this morning?’ Matthew said.
‘If that’s where you went,’ Miles replied.
‘No, I didn’t know,’ said Caitlin.
‘I did a lot of work with him, you know, on the forestry project. I was quite closely involved.’
‘What was it all about, Dad?’ Alex said, feigning ignorance of the documents he’d seen that morning. ‘Tony never struck me as the environmental type.’
‘Maybe that’s a question for Caitlin.’
Caitlin shook her head. ‘I don’t really know, to be honest.’ She glanced at Matthew. ‘He didn’t really talk about it much. Dad had lots of projects.’
‘I reckon it was a tax dodge,’ Matthew said.
Margaret exploded. ‘Matthew, that is enough!’
This time, though, Matthew wasn’t in the mood for backing down. ‘Mum, it’s a perfectly valid suggestion. Loads of people buy land through offshore trusts as part of tax-avoidance schemes. It’s happening all the time. We’ve already established that Tony was hardly an eco-activist. It wouldn’t exactly be out of character if he’d done it for financial reasons.’
Miles stood and picked up the carvers. ‘It’s not a question, Matthew, of whether or not it’s reasonable,’ he said. ‘It’s a question of whether or not it’s appropriate.’
‘Quite,’ said Margaret, her feathers smoothed somewhat by her husband’s even tone.
‘Who’d like some more meat? Caitlin? Can I tempt you? Emily, obviously not, but there’s plenty more veg. Alex, I know you’ll take some more. And Matthew, Caitlin’s glass is empty – top her up, would you. And while you’re at it you can go around the table.’
Social embarrassment successfully averted, the meal continued, discussion revolving around less inflammatory subjects, until the course was done. Nonetheless there was a sense of collective relief when Margaret stood and clapped her hands.
‘Right, no levitating tables in this house,’ she said. ‘We’re still very much at the manual stage. So come on everyone. All hands on deck.’
Mechanically efficient after many years of training, the family carried dishes, scraped plates, wiped surfaces, stored leftovers, filled the dishwasher and assembled the various components of dessert with barely a word exchanged. Then, just as Margaret was handing round dishes of rhubarb crumble and telling people to help themselves to cream, the low clattering of an unshielded petrol engine disturbed the prandial calm.
‘Oh those wretched motorbikes,’ she tutted. But the sound did not fade away and die, as it would have done had its source been some passing Kawasaki. Instead it came and went and came and went, changing direction as if moving in circles around the house.
As the volume increased for a third time, Matthew got up and walked into the front bay window to investigate.
‘Matthew, we’re still in the middle of eating.’
‘I just want to see what …’
He broke off and ducked by instinct as something large and black flashed past the window.
‘What the fuck …?’
‘Matthew!’ The admonishment came from Miles this time.
‘Well it’s not exactly every day a pair of legs falls from the sky into our driveway.’
Dessert was forgotten, and Margaret raised her hands in despair as her children all jumped up from the table and ran to the front door. Outside they found a man in a crash helmet standing on the property’s large main lawn, the buttercup-yellow canopy of a paraglider fluttering above him, and what looked like a giant ventilation fan strapped to his back.
‘Mind my roses!’ Margaret yelled, as the canopy began to float down towards the borders, and in response the pilot began hauling on the suspension lines in an attempt to guide the delicate pillow of fabric to the safety of the grass. Now that he’d turned they could see his face. It was Jamie Blake.
‘Hey!’ he shouted cheerily. ‘Thought I’d drop in!’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Alex quietly, voicing a thought shared by the group. ‘This is a bit of a surprise.’
As they stood, slightly stunned, pondering the protocol for greeting someone you hadn’t seen for twenty years when he’d literally dropped into your garden, a maroon pick-up truck rolled into the driveway with Sean Nolan at the wheel and a bearded man of around the same age in the passenger seat.
Sean got out and came jogging up, his face clogged with concern. ‘I’m very sorry Mrs Wold. He wasn’t supposed to land here. He hasn’t caused any damag
e, has he?’
‘Not for want of trying.’
Emily intervened. ‘Oh come on Mum, lighten up. It’s okay, Sean, really. Total losses amount to one cold rhubarb crumble and a few slightly bothered roses.’
Awed by the spectacle of something akin to a superhero flying in to say hi to his grandparents, Rufus had already decided that there was no point in standing on ceremony and had set off along the weathered stone path that led round the flower beds to investigate more closely. By the time the others caught up with him he was standing in front of the grounded paramotor trying to clip himself into the harness, Jamie’s helmet balanced on his head.
‘I want to go flying,’ he said. He’d got hold of the throttle by now – a small metal trigger at the end of a cable – and was squeezing it repeatedly like a water gun.
Alex laughed. ‘I think you’re going to have to grow a few inches taller first, Rufe.’
‘I could take him up,’ Jamie said, giving Alex a wink. ‘It would be fun. I could just strap you to my belly, Rufus, like a baby kangaroo.’
Rufus thought this sounded like an excellent idea.
‘Can I go, Dad, can I? Mum? Can I go?’
Mia blanched. ‘I’m not sure I’m quite so keen as you all are.’
Matthew glanced at the narrow gap between tree and house into which Jamie had descended. ‘I don’t think you’ve got the first idea how to fly that thing. You’re bloody lucky you didn’t disembowel yourself on one of the chimney pots.’
‘Swear box Uncle Matthew, fifty pee,’ chirped Rufus happily.
‘He does know what he’s doing,’ Sean said. ‘Unfortunately.’