Fireside Gothic

by Andrew Taylor

  He glanced over his shoulder. ‘No. Portugal.’

  ‘Lovely when you’re there,’ Gerald said. ‘But it can’t be easy to keep it going when you’re not. I mean, what if the pipes burst or something?’

  I put the teapot on the table. Gerald took out a packet of biscuits left over from Christmas and stared at it. I pushed him out of the way and took out the biscuit tin and a plate of flapjacks.

  ‘And then there’s security,’ Gerald said. ‘Always a problem with second homes.’

  ‘Tea’s up,’ I said, as no one else seemed to have noticed.

  Jack turned. For the first time he looked directly at me. ‘What’s that, Clare? The shed or whatever it is.’

  ‘We call it the Hovel,’ I said. ‘Or rather, the children did when they were little and the name stuck.’

  ‘Quaint, isn’t it?’ Gerald said, drawing out a chair. ‘It’s a squatter’s cottage, probably.’

  ‘Squatters? Here in the country?’

  ‘Oh yes. The Forest was Crown land, you see, and the boundaries have always been fluid. In the old days, they say, people had a right to put up a house on a bit of waste ground as long as they could do it between dawn and dusk.’

  ‘Like putting up a tent?’

  ‘Yes. A tent with a stone chimney. Once you had your chimney you could build the rest at your leisure. It was the chimney that counted.’

  ‘So no one lives there?’

  ‘Not for years and years. It was a complete ruin when we moved here. It’s more or less weather-tight now, and we’ve run a power line to it. Clare was going to use it as a studio, but it’s too damp and cold for that.’

  ‘The children and their friends used to camp there,’ I said. ‘We did have wild thoughts of turning it into a holiday home and letting it out. But we decided not to in the end.’

  ‘No,’ Jack said. ‘You wouldn’t want to have strangers there.’

  The cat flap in the back door made its slip-slap sound. Jack glanced in the direction of the noise.

  ‘I didn’t know you had a cat.’

  ‘His name’s Cannop,’ Gerald said, still talking more loudly than usual. ‘Thinks he owns the place. Just push him out of the way if he’s sitting on your chair. He’s used to it.’

  Cannop was walking towards me but he stopped when he caught sight of Jack, who it happened was sitting in the Windsor chair with the frayed velvet cushion that Cannop liked to use himself when he had any choice in the matter.

  Jack touched his lips with his tongue. ‘I don’t like cats much. Sorry.’

  Gerald lumbered to his feet. ‘I’ll put him out for a bit,’ he said, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. ‘Do him good, eh? Thinks he owns the place.’

  He scooped up the cat, who gave a yowl of protest, and pushed him headfirst through the cat flap. Cannop’s legs scrabbled for purchase but he was no match for Gerald’s superior force. When the cat was outside, Gerald locked the cat flap.

  ‘Sorry,’ Jack said again. ‘It’s just one of those things. I’ve never liked them.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ I said, feeling that, in some obscure way, I had failed in my duty as a host. ‘We’ll keep him out of your way while you’re here.’

  As I said the words I wondered how easy that would be to achieve. It depended on Cannop. Like most cats, he generally did more or less what he wanted in the long run.

  When we had finished the tea, I took Jack upstairs to show him his room. It was over the kitchen, long and thin, with a sloping ceiling and two windows looking out over the Forest.

  ‘I’m afraid you can only stand up in part of it,’ I said. ‘It used to be our daughter’s when she was small.’

  Jack propped his enormous backpack against the bed. ‘My cousin,’ he said. ‘We’ve never met, have we?’

  ‘I expect you’ll meet her one of these days – Annie’s at university now.’

  ‘And you and Gerald have a son, too?’

  ‘Tom. He’s living in Birmingham, working in a café.’

  Jack stooped to peer out of the nearest window. ‘How big is it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Forest.’

  ‘Over twenty-five thousand acres, they say, plus all the outlying parts.’

  ‘Can people go there?’

  ‘You can go anywhere you like, more or less. It’s publicly owned. Sometimes you can walk for miles without meeting a soul.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ Jack said.

  He went to bed early that night. To be honest, it was a relief. He hadn’t spoken much during supper and Gerald and I had struggled to keep a conversation going.

  We cleared up in the kitchen. The floorboards overhead creaked as Jack moved to and fro in his room. Afterwards we went into the sitting room and turned on the television.

  ‘It’s going to be hard work if he’s like this all the time,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not his fault.’

  ‘I know. But what’s he going to do all day?’

  Gerald shrugged. ‘I’m sure you’ll find something to occupy him.’

  ‘It’s easy for you to say,’ I said. ‘But you’ll be at the office five days a week.’

  ‘Look, Clare, we can’t just ignore him. He hasn’t got anyone else.’

  ‘I know. I’m not saying we should turn him out.’

  ‘I’d have thought you’d quite like the company. You said the other day how empty the house felt now the kids are hardly ever here.’

  Gerald had an annoying habit of turning something I had said against me in argument. I said, ‘Yes, but it also means I now have more time to concentrate on work.’

  We watched the talking heads on the television for a moment or two.

  ‘Nothing wrong with his appetite, anyway,’ Gerald said. He stretched out his hand and wrapped it round my forearm. ‘He just needs peace and quiet. Regular meals. Not too many people. We can give him all that.’

  I patted his hand, accepting the olive branch.

  ‘Did he say anything about what happened? On the way from the station.’

  ‘He didn’t say much at all. I did most of the talking.’

  ‘He looks all right.’

  ‘Yes, but he wasn’t actually wounded. Not physically. It’s post-traumatic stress disorder. Or is it syndrome?’

  ‘What’s he going to do with his life now he’s out of the army? Does he know?’

  ‘He’s considering his options. That’s what he said in the car.’

  ‘I know it’s selfish, but I just wish …’ I broke off.

  ‘Wish what?’

  I looked at the brightly coloured figures on the screen in front of us. ‘I wish he could consider them somewhere else. With someone else.’

  2

  That was the problem. Jack had no one except us.

  Gerald had been his mother’s brother. She had married an engineer whose work took him to the Middle East and Central Asia. Jack had either lived with them or boarded at an international school in Geneva. Sue and Gerald were perfectly friendly as siblings go but she was about six years older than he was and they had never been close. She hadn’t even come to our wedding.

  We exchanged cards and presents on Christmases and birthdays. There were occasional phone calls, though these had dwindled in frequency over the years. Gerald had stayed with them once, quite early on in our marriage, when he had been in Dubai for work. That’s when he had met Jack for the first and only time and seen him playing with Lego.

  Sue was long dead, killed in a car crash at a busy intersection in Ankara when Jack was away at school. His father had died of cancer last year.

  Jack had phoned us out of the blue last week. He had been invalided out of the army, he said, though he was perfectly OK now, really, just a bit jittery sometimes. All he needed was a bit of peace and quiet and time to sort himself out.

  So naturally Gerald asked him to stay. Gerald was a decent man. The Forest was full of peace and quiet, or so people think.

  On his first morni
ng, Jack slept late. Gerald left for work at about seven thirty, as usual. He was a designer for a company that had a laboratory and offices just outside Monmouth. They made components for electronic instruments. He explained to me precisely what he did on several occasions but I never really understood it.

  His departure left me in limbo. Usually at this time of the day I would leave the washing-up and, still in my dressing gown, shuffle into the studio with a cup of coffee and Radio Four. Cannop would often come with me and doze on the sagging, paint-stained sofa.

  But I couldn’t just abandon Jack to his own devices, not on his first morning. So I got dressed, too, and made myself look respectable. I pottered about downstairs. I had fed Cannop and put him outside before Gerald left. The cat was now sitting on the kitchen windowsill, looking in. I felt irritated on his behalf as well as my own.

  The irritation evaporated when Jack came downstairs just before nine. His hair was unbrushed and he hadn’t shaved. He looked so young and defenceless that it was hard to be angry with him. I poured him coffee and we sat at the kitchen table.

  ‘How did you sleep?’ I asked.

  ‘Off and on. You know how it is.’

  ‘Strange bed? New place?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s it.’ He glanced over to the window, at Cannop, and looked away. ‘I’ll go for a run after this,’ he said, cradling the coffee mug with his hands. ‘Clear my head. What’s the best way into the Forest?’

  ‘We’ve got our own gate. It’s just beside the Hovel. Do you want a map?’

  ‘No thanks – I’d rather find my own way. But I can go anywhere, right? I’m not going to be trespassing?’

  ‘No. It’s our Forest as much as anyone else’s.’

  ‘What about you? I don’t want to stop you doing anything.’ He looked awkward, as people often do when they mention my occupation. ‘Your … your art.’

  ‘I’ll just carry on,’ I said. ‘I’ll be in the studio – it’s at the far end of the house – beyond the sitting room. Come and find me when you get back. Or help yourself if you need anything.’

  I went into the studio and became immersed in what I was doing. Every now and then I would surface – once because I glimpsed Jack jogging up the garden path on his way back; and again because Cannop yowled so piteously at the studio window that I had to let him in.

  It was nearly lunchtime when I emerged, driven not only by a desire for food but by the niggling sense that I really ought to be a proper hostess for half an hour. Jack was already in the kitchen. He’d found the map of the Forest on the dresser and spread it on the table before him.

  He looked up. ‘I saw a boar.’ His face was transfigured, as though he had just seen the Virgin Mary. ‘It just stared at me and then lumbered away. It was like something out of the Middle Ages. Or Game of Thrones.’

  ‘We’ve got a lot of them.’ I took out a container of soup I had made at the weekend and poured it into a saucepan. ‘Some people say too many. Still, the tourists love them. And some of the locals.’

  He said, ‘There must be lots of wildlife.’

  There was something in his voice that made me glance at him. ‘Deer, of course,’ I said. ‘Foxes, rabbits, grey squirrels, badgers, weasels and rats and God knows what else. And then there are the birds.’

  ‘I guess you never know what you might find, what might be hiding out there.’

  ‘No.’ I turned up the heat and began to slice the bread. ‘Sometimes you see white stags. There’s probably a colony of unicorns somewhere.’

  It wasn’t much of a joke, but he laughed. That was the first time I had seen him laugh. It made him look younger.

  We had the soup, followed by cheese and fruit. Jack ate well; there was never anything wrong with his appetite.

  Afterwards, he leaned back in his chair and cleared his throat. ‘Clare?’ he said. ‘I was wondering. You know I didn’t sleep brilliantly?’

  ‘Yes. Is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘You know.’

  I smiled. ‘I don’t, actually.’

  ‘After everything, I kind of got uncomfortable about being in houses. Sleeping, I mean.’

  I didn’t know him well enough to try to cajole a confidence from him. ‘So what would you like to do?’

  ‘Would you mind if I slept outside?’

  I stared at him. ‘But, Jack – you’ll freeze. We still get a ground frost sometimes.’

  ‘I’ve got a good sleeping bag. Anyway, I was wondering if you’d let me sleep in the Hovel.’

  ‘Doesn’t that count as a house, too?’

  ‘Not really.’ He glanced out of the window, where Cannop was looking in at us. ‘It’s got a temporary feel to it, hasn’t it? Like a shed or a tent. A tent with a stone chimney – that’s what Gerald called it. A place for squatters.’

  ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t sleep there. If you’re sure you want to.’

  ‘Great.’ Jack was almost cheerful. ‘I looked in the windows this morning. And there’s a sort of loft, too, isn’t there, up the stone steps at the side? I’d be fine.’

  I didn’t say anything. But he read what was in my mind.

  ‘It’s not the bedroom you gave me, you know. It’s a great room. It’s just me. Besides, it means that the cat can come in the house again, and I won’t have to feel guilty about that as well.’

  ‘As well as what?’

  He coloured and pushed back his chair. ‘Oh, you know.’ He began to stack the plates and bowls. ‘As well as for putting you out like this.’

  The Hovel was a two-storey building with a sagging roof of pantiles. Gerald and I had been full of plans for it when we moved here fifteen years ago. First there was the holiday accommodation idea, and then the studio. Neither of them worked because we lacked the money and the will to convert the Hovel into something habitable, even on a temporary basis, by normal human beings. It was tiny. It didn’t have water, let alone a proper lavatory. It managed to be damp all the year round, whatever the weather. Everything we kept there went rusty or mouldy. We’d often talked about putting in a wood burner, but we never had.

  So gradually the Hovel became what it was now: a cross between the garden shed and the place where we put things we didn’t really want but couldn’t bear to throw away. When they were younger, the children used it – first as a playhouse and then, when they were teenagers, for activities they thought we would disapprove of.

  After we had cleaned away lunch, Jack and I went to the Hovel together. We kept it locked, because you could never be sure who might wander in from the Forest.

  I showed him the ground floor first, a low-ceilinged room with the rusting remains of a cast-iron range in the fireplace. There was a dead blackbird in the grate, a desiccated and dusty collection of feathers and bones. It was gloomy in here because, apart from the open door, the only other light came from a grimy window on the side of the building facing the Forest.

  Jack touched the handle of the lawnmower, unused since last autumn. ‘I could mow the lawn, if you like.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘I like gardens but I’m not so keen on gardening.’

  ‘No problem.’

  An external flight of steps led up to the room above. I unlocked the door and went in. Jack stopped on the threshold. For a moment I saw it with his eyes: the clumsy stone walls which had lost most of the plaster that had once covered them; the delicate iron fireplace, a refugee from a smarter house; a small window, grey with dust and cobwebs, looking out on to the garden; the beams and rafters rising to the tiled roof that allowed specks of daylight into the room. There was an old mattress against the wall and a cluster of cigarette ends in the fireplace.

  ‘The floor’s OK,’ I said. ‘Gerald put down new boards just after we moved in. We had to take down the ceiling at the same time, but we never got round to replacing it.’

  ‘It’s fine as it is.’

  ‘I’m sure we can find you somethi
ng better than that mattress. There’s no loo, I’m afraid.’

  Jack shrugged. ‘I can go in the Forest or come up to the house.’

  ‘We can give you a potty,’ I said. ‘I have got rather a nice Victorian one in my studio, with a plant in it.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, smiling at me. ‘Everything’s perfect.’

  We spent the next half hour playing house. That’s what it felt like – children pretending to set up a home. I even picked some daffodils and put them in a vase on the windowsill of the upper room.

  Jack did the real work. He swept the room and brought up an inflatable camping mattress from the house, and then his backpack. I found blankets, torches and candles. He laid out his sleeping bag on the new mattress but he didn’t unpack his backpack.

  He took off his jersey and rolled up his shirt sleeves as he worked. His arms were tanned, much more so than his face. There was something boyish about his movements – supple, swift, sometimes clumsy.

  I opened my mouth to suggest he might like a radio to keep him company. But the words never came out. At that moment Jack was extending his right arm to hang his coat on a nail in the wall by the door. I saw his forearm. There was a scratch on the soft skin.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your arm. Underneath.’

  He rotated the forearm and we both looked at the scratch. It was about three inches long. At one point it went quite deep and must have drawn a bit of blood. The skin had scabbed over but the wound beneath was rimmed with the reddish-pink of swollen flesh.

  ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He turned away and patted the pockets of the coat, which he had emptied not five minutes before. ‘It’s nothing. Probably a nail or something.’

  ‘Have you cleaned it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s OK. I’ve had my jabs.’

  It wasn’t the words, it was something in his voice. Don’t fuss. He was warning me off.

  I turned aside and ran a duster over the windowsill, a pointless exercise in a room where the dirt was everywhere. Jack was right to shut me up. I’d been treating him as if he was a child, as if he were Tom or Annie, and I had a right to tell him what to do. But he wasn’t, and I didn’t.