Fireside Gothic

by Andrew Taylor

  So in a moment I asked him if he wanted a radio to keep him company. He said no thank you. He had rolled down his shirtsleeves by now and was in the process of putting on his jersey.

  It seems so trivial, described baldly like that. But it wasn’t. Two things happened that afternoon which were both important, though I didn’t realize their significance until later.

  First, there was the scratch and Jack’s reaction when I asked him about it. The other thing was that I’d learned that Jack wasn’t like the children or even Gerald.

  He was Jack. He was different from everyone else.

  3

  Ten days passed.

  It was astonishing how quickly our semi-detached lives became a routine. Gerald went off to work five days a week. I spent my time in the studio with Cannop and the radio for company. Occasionally I would come out to cook or to do a burst of housework. I went shopping. I saw friends. I talked to the children on the phone.

  Meanwhile, Jack spent most of his days outside. It was a mild March that year with some wonderfully sunny days which seem to have been misplaced from May. He worked in the garden – first mowing the lawn, and then pruning the fruit trees and the climbing plants and the shrubs. When that was done, he attacked the brambles that had sprouted over the years into a small, vicious thicket in the corner by the Hovel. The soil was difficult to work – it was full of stones and scraps of smelted iron. It took him days to dig out the roots.

  Every day, rain or shine, he went for a run in the Forest, and often a walk as well. We saw him, usually, at mealtimes, and sometimes he sat with us in the evenings and watched television.

  We had the news on one evening and there was an item about Afghanistan. After half a minute, he stood up abruptly, said goodnight and left the room.

  Gerald raised his eyebrows. Most of the time he gave the impression that he noticed very little about other people, but he could be surprisingly perceptive when he wanted to be. We heard the back door slam. Cannop sidled into the room and leapt on to my lap.

  ‘Something hasn’t healed,’ Gerald said. Then his eyes went back to the television.

  The following afternoon, I took Jack a cup of tea. He was digging what had been a vegetable patch, though Gerald and I had long since lost interest in it. It was a nice afternoon and I carried my own mug outside as well. We sat in the sun on the bench under the apple tree.

  Cannop had followed me out of the studio. He sat at a safe distance from us underneath the wheelbarrow. He stared at us.

  Jack stared back. He seemed not to mind the cat when they were outside, not unless Cannop came too close, in which case Jack would stamp his foot or hiss or even – I’d seen this once from an upstairs window – throw a lump of earth at him. ‘It’s an odd name,’ Jack said. ‘Where does it come from?’

  ‘Cannop? It’s where we found him. It’s a valley in the Forest.’

  ‘He came from the Forest? So he’s wild?’

  ‘Probably not, though you never know. He was tiny – two or three weeks old, the vet reckoned. When Annie saw him, he was in the middle of a path making tiny mewing sounds. It was love at first sight. On Annie’s side, at least.’

  Cannop got up, turned his back on us and sat down again. I tried not to anthropomorphize cats but I was sure that he knew we were talking about him, and he didn’t like it.

  ‘We fed him with a bottle in the first few weeks. We didn’t think he’d survive. But he did.’

  ‘So if he wasn’t wild, how did he get in the Forest?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe his mother was a runaway. Or maybe he was picked up by a bird or some sort of animal – then dropped. It happens.’

  ‘I bet he was wild,’ Jack said. ‘Isn’t that more likely?’

  ‘Maybe. Cannop’s always been a bit stand-offish, like farm cats are.’

  ‘And there are wild cats, aren’t there? So he could be one of those.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a wild cat in the Forest?’

  He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking over the rim of his mug at Cannop, still with his back to us under the wheelbarrow.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen ordinary cats sometimes. Usually in woodland where houses aren’t that far away.’ I paused. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Not seen. Not exactly. But I saw two paw prints yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d recognize a cat’s prints from something else’s.’

  ‘It was a cat,’ he said, his voice rising. ‘I’m sure of it. I know what they look like.’

  ‘OK. Where?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. It was somewhere I hadn’t been before. The path was going up from the old tram road, and it went round the edge of an old quarry. Quite a small one. It looked as if it hadn’t been worked for years.’

  That wasn’t much help. I knew of several abandoned quarries in the Forest and there were probably many others I didn’t know.

  ‘There was a nest,’ he went on. ‘About halfway up the face of the rock. That’s why I stopped.’

  That nudged my memory. ‘A big one? Very untidy?’

  His face brightened. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘It’s a buzzard’s, I think. You must have been at Spion Kop.’

  The name made him hesitate, but he was too intent on his paw prints to allow himself to be distracted. ‘The path was muddy,’ he went on, ‘and that’s where I saw the prints.’ He held out the finger and thumb of his left hand, the tips three or four inches apart. ‘About that wide.’

  ‘It can’t have been a cat then,’ I said. ‘Too big.’

  ‘But it was a cat.’ He sounded like a petulant child. ‘I know what a cat looks like.’

  You don’t argue with children when they are being silly. We sat in silence while we finished our tea. Jack kept his head down. There was a smear of dried mud on his jeans, and he scratched it with his thumbnail. When I went into the house, Cannop emerged from underneath the wheelbarrow and stalked after me without a backward glance.

  A day or two later, I went to Spion Kop. It was an impulse decision. I’d been to the supermarket and the road home passed within a mile of it. It was a fine day and it would do me good to stretch my legs.

  I left my car in the lay-by at the bottom of the valley and followed the old tramway into the Forest. The path climbed higher and higher. It was one of the paradoxes of the Forest that, for all its rural appearance, it had been an industrial site since before the Romans came. Even now in its green depths you found active stone quarries and tiny coal mines. You stumbled on the traces of long-gone industries: the ruins of blast furnaces whose walls and enclosures looked like lost cities in the South American jungle; the ventilation shafts of the great coal pits of a century ago; railway bridges built of stone where no trains had run for generations; and the wild and impossibly romantic traces of surface iron workings. Nothing stayed the same for long: like any organic entity, the Forest was constantly changing, month by month, year by year.

  I saw no one as I followed the tram road – I call it that, though there were no rails or sleepers, only two parallel lines of worn stones rising slowly up the valley between two hills. There were conifer plantations nearby, richly textured like a patchwork blanket made of different tweeds. The mud clung to my feet and splashed the legs of my jeans. It was chilly, but spring was in the air.

  Half a mile in, I turned on to a narrow track that curled round the side of a hill. The trees closed around me. This part of the Forest had not been planted and managed systematically, or not recently; perhaps never. There were huge, misshapen yews, oaks and beeches, pines and birch tangled together on a steep hillside littered with fragments of rock. Here was the illusion of a world that belonged to another time, a world where chance ruled and everything was possible.

  I had seen no one since I had left the car. For the first ten minutes or so I had heard the grinding and whirring from the stone works at the bottom of the valley. Now even that had dropped away.

 
The further I walked, the more a sense of relaxation crept over me. I didn’t know why the Forest had this effect on me. It calmed and soothed. The solitude had something to do with it, that and the ever-changing stream of greens and browns that dominated its colour palette.

  The odd thing was that the Forest didn’t affect everyone the same way. Some people – Gerald included – found it an oppressive place. They felt enclosed by it and even, on a primitive level that belonged to dreams and childhood, somehow threatened. There should be a word for this, dendrophobia, the fear of trees; but there wasn’t – I’d checked in the dictionary.

  Gerald didn’t like me going there alone. He thought I might be attacked or, at the very least, manage to lose myself. He was a practical man so he bought me a compass and a rape alarm, which I generally left in the car – not intentionally but because I forgot them. He believed, I think, on some level of himself that he didn’t know existed, that the Forest was a place of monsters. He was right. But it was so many other things as well.

  It took me a while to find Spion Kop again because I got lost. (That was another thing that Gerald didn’t understand, that I actually liked getting lost in the Forest, because I knew that sooner or later I would find my way again.) When at last I reached the quarry, I approached it from a direction I didn’t expect. It revealed itself in a theatrical way that made me catch my breath.

  Spion Kop was a ragged hole hacked into a slope of local sandstone. Great blocks of stone were scattered around its perimeter, some partly cut, but most of them still as they had been when they were dragged up from the quarry. Trees, saplings and bushes had softened the harshness of the place. They also shrouded and protected it. The buzzard’s nest was still there, a large and very untidy cluster of twigs placed in a low semicircular niche about halfway up an almost sheer rockface. Taken all in all, it was a dream landscape, one that had wandered out of the sort of fairytale that had a good chance of ending badly.

  The path passed between two blocks of stone, smeared with lichen and partly enveloped by a yew tree. I paused between them, my eye caught by the pattern of the tree roots and the way they curled around the rock, forcing their way into cracks, slowly strangling it; for, in the Forest, the soft conquered the hard.

  At that moment I saw a trainer and part of a leg. I drew back, suddenly cautious. I shifted to one side and peered around the corner of the stone.

  It was Jack. He was lying on his front and looking into the quarry. In order to reach the edge, he must have struggled through the tangle of rusting barbed wire that was meant to prevent passing members of the public from plunging to their doom. I couldn’t see his face but I saw his head rotating slowly from left to right, as if he were making a methodical survey of the quarry floor.

  I drew back. My being here at the same time as him was pure coincidence. But he wouldn’t know that. He might think I had followed him, that I was stalking him.

  I didn’t want to disturb him. I retreated as quietly as I had come.

  I was on edge. That’s one reason why I didn’t take much notice of what happened next. Even now I’m not sure if I imagined it.

  As I slipped away, I thought I saw something move very quickly on the edge of my range of vision. There was a sense of something sinuous, black and swift-moving. I turned my head but it was too late.

  If there had been something, it had gone. I was left with the sense that, just as I had been watching Jack, someone or something had been watching me.

  4

  ‘Spion Kop,’ Gerald said, ‘was one of those thoroughly stupid battles that the British seem to like so much. Like the Charge of the Light Brigade or Dunkirk. Everyone else tries to forget their military disasters. But we commemorate them.’

  Gerald looked challengingly at us, as if daring us to disagree. He fancied himself as a bit of a historian, largely because he watched a lot of historical documentaries on TV. I nodded, though my mind was going over tomorrow’s work in the studio. Jack sipped his wine. His eyes were restless, and I guess he wanted to slip away to the Hovel as soon as he decently could.

  ‘South Africa?’ I said.

  ‘Second Boer War.’ Gerald emptied the rest of the wine into our glasses. ‘It was embarrassing. A few Boer farmers against the might of the British Empire. Did you know one reason the British moved so slowly was because of all the officers’ baggage? The general – what was his name? – brought along a fully equipped kitchen and a cast-iron bathroom.’

  Cannop was scratching on the kitchen window, demanding to be let in.

  ‘It’s always the same. Take Dunkirk, for example …’

  I tried to find a way to change the subject without hurting anyone’s feelings. But Gerald in the grip of an enthusiasm needed an act of God to stop him.

  ‘You’d think one of the good things about losing the Empire would be that we wouldn’t have any more imperialist disasters to celebrate back home …’

  Here it comes, I thought.

  ‘… but no. First there’s Iraq, and then Afghanistan.’

  Jack put his glass very carefully on the table. He stood up.

  ‘It’s the national psyche, if you ask me—’ Gerald broke off. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, fine.’ Jack sidled towards the door. ‘Just a bit tired. Think I overdid it today. Those brambles are fighting back.’

  ‘Anything I can get you?’ I said.

  ‘No thanks.’ He smiled in a half-hearted way. ‘I just need an early night. Goodnight.’

  He opened the back door. Cannop slipped between his legs and went to ground under the table. Jack went outside and closed the door.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Gerald said. ‘A bit rude, wasn’t it, going off like that.’

  ‘I think it was you talking about military disasters that upset him.’

  ‘But I was putting a historical perspective on it. I thought he’d find it interesting. As an ex-soldier.’

  ‘I don’t think Jack finds Afghanistan interesting. Not exactly.’

  ‘But I was talking generally.’

  I wanted to throw something at my husband. ‘I know you were. But Jack’s just back from Afghanistan. He was given an honourable discharge, or whatever they call it. And something happened there, didn’t it? Something that’s caused post-traumatic stress.’

  ‘He seems perfectly normal to me most of the time. Bit odd about the cat, I grant you that. But that’s all, really.’

  ‘You’re not here most of the time. I am.’

  ‘I wonder what it was,’ Gerald said.

  ‘What what was?’

  ‘The thing that caused the stress.’

  ‘Better not to know. And for God’s sake don’t ask him. Promise me.’

  We cleared away and went into the sitting room. Gerald wasn’t an unkind man and he certainly wasn’t stupid. But sometimes he could be slow about catching on.

  Gerald had an early start – a meeting with a client in London in the morning – so he went to bed early. I stayed downstairs.

  It was a clear night. When I took the food waste out to the bin, I lingered outside to admire the stars for a moment. It’s very dark outside where we live, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust.

  I glanced down the garden, towards the Hovel. I smelled tobacco. A tiny red glow was coming from the bench.

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘Hi.’

  I picked my way through the darkness, navigating by the cigarette. I stopped when I was three yards away from the bench.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Fine.’

  ‘I hope we didn’t drive you away. You know – Gerald talking like that.’

  The tip glowed more brightly. ‘No worries.’

  ‘Mind if I sit?’

  ‘Be my guest.’ He shifted along the bench. He held up the cigarette. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Not at all.’ I sat down. ‘About Gerald: he didn’t mean anything, you know. He just gets a bit carried away sometimes.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’r />
  He sucked on the cigarette and I glimpsed his profile, in the red haze. It was cold on the bench. I felt the damp seeping through my skirt. I shivered.

  ‘You’re cold.’

  ‘Just a bit chilly.’

  ‘Here – take this.’

  He struggled out of his jacket and placed it with clumsy chivalry over my shoulders. I didn’t try to stop him. I thought it might be good for him to feel in control, as if he were the one providing the help rather than receiving it. It’s not much fun when you’re always the one that has to be helped. I saw that with my mother when she was dying. Being powerless does bad things to the soul.

  The jacket was heavy and unfamiliar on my shoulders. It was lined with a fleece that still held a trace of Jack’s warmth. It smelled slightly of tobacco.

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I said.

  He didn’t reply at once, time enough for me to think that there was a lot I didn’t know about him, and there was no reason why he should tell me anything at all.

  ‘Do you want one?’ he said.

  ‘No, I don’t—’ I broke off. ‘Well, yes. Why not?’

  ‘Right-hand pocket.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The coat.’

  I felt for the pocket and took out the cigarettes and lighter. I made sure my hand didn’t brush against him. I wondered if Gerald was asleep yet, and what on earth I thought I was doing.

  I had trouble lighting the cigarette. There was a faint breeze, enough to blow out the small flame.

  ‘Here. Let me shield it.’

  Jack leaned over and cupped his hands over mine, bringing the warmth of his touch to my cold fingers. I sucked on the cigarette. The flame licked its tip. The tobacco caught and I inhaled automatically. The smoke scraped like sandpaper. I coughed. Jack snatched his hands away, and shuffled his body along the bench, further from mine.

  ‘Sorry. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since I was about twenty. Out of practice.’ I took another drag, more cautiously this time, and managed not to cough. ‘That’s more like it.’