‘Don’t be sorry,’ he said. ‘There’s no point.’
The words lay in the darkness between us. In the silence they acquired a deeper, more general meaning.
‘No,’ I said at last, ‘I suppose there isn’t.’
He stooped and ground out his own cigarette on the flagstone in front of the bench.
‘Being sorry does nothing,’ he said. ‘You just have to deal with it, right? If you can.’
I took another slow, cautious drag and tapped the cigarette. ‘Deal with what?’
‘There was a cave. That was the thing. What happened there. It was sort of OK till then.’
Another silence. I sucked the cigarette again. In its glow, Jack’s profile trembled briefly in the darkness. Something partial and temporary.
‘We were on patrol in the hills.’ He spoke in a rush, as if trying to get the words out before he lost his nerve. ‘Routine, really. But there was a mine … it was at the mouth of a cave. I’d gone inside but the guy behind me stepped on it. Simon. He had kids, you know. He used to show us photos …’
Survivor guilt, I thought – I’d read about it. The belief that someone else’s death was really meant for you: that your survival was dependent on another’s sacrifice. It made a nonsense of the idea that we were solely programmed to prize our survival, or those of our genes, above anything else.
‘That was bad,’ Jack said. ‘I dream of him most nights.’
I took another drag. For a moment he loomed from the darkness. Not his profile, this time. He was looking at me. The light from my cigarette made sparks in the pupils of his eyes.
‘Even so, it’s OK. Well, it isn’t, but you know what I mean. Feeling God-awful about it is something you’d expect. It’s perfectly natural.’
He seemed to be waiting for an answer, so I said, ‘Yes. But it can’t be easy to cope with.’
‘Of course it isn’t bloody easy.’
‘No. Sorry.’
‘And stop saying sorry. You’ve done nothing wrong.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. We had already established that there was no point in being sorry. But I was. I stubbed out the cigarette and made a mental note to scrub my hands when I went back to the house in case Gerald smelled tobacco on me. My head was buzzing from the nicotine.
‘It’s the cave that’s the point,’ Jack said. ‘What happened there, what happened afterwards, after Simon died. That’s not OK because—’
The slip-slap of the cat flap made him break off. Cannop was going on his evening patrol.
‘I must go to bed,’ Jack said. ‘I’ve been rabbiting on and keeping you outside all this time.’ The bench shifted beneath me as he stood up. ‘Sorry.’
5
I didn’t see Jack again until the following afternoon. I found him in the kitchen when I went to make a cup of tea. He was rummaging in the food cupboard.
‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I was looking for some salt.’
‘Of course not. Table salt? Second shelf down on the left. Or sea salt?’
‘Table salt.’
I noticed that the kettle was coming to the boil. ‘Tea?’
‘Yes – thanks.’ He hefted the salt in his hand. ‘I want to make some salt water.’ He hesitated. ‘For disinfectant. Is there something I can put it in?’
I gave him a jug. ‘Have you got a cut or something?’
‘A scratch.’
‘Like before?’
‘It’s the same one, actually.’
‘Show me,’ I said.
He glanced at me, his eyebrows wrinkling together in a frown, and for an instant I thought he would tell me to mind my own business. But he rolled up the shirtsleeve on his right arm.
I drew in my breath sharply. ‘I thought it was healing.’
‘It was. It must have got infected or something.’
The scratch was now an angry red stripe on his skin. He touched it with his forefinger. He winced, though he tried to conceal it.
‘You should let someone see it,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you to A and E, if you like. Or maybe the practice nurse at our doctors’ would—’
‘There’s no point,’ he interrupted. ‘I’ve had all the jabs. There’s nothing they can do that I can’t do myself.’
‘Are you sure? I could just ring our surgery and—’
‘No.’ His face flushed. ‘There’s no need. It’s a lot of fuss about nothing.’
‘OK.’ I turned away to rinse the teapot. ‘But let me know if you change your mind.’
‘Look, I don’t mean to be rude. Sorry if I was.’
I said, ‘You say sorry an awful lot for someone who says there’s no point in being sorry.’
We stared at each other across the table. Then one of us – I don’t know which was first – started to laugh.
It must have been soon after I saw the infected scratch that the three of us went to the pub. It’s hard to be precise. The days and weeks of Jack’s visit blur in the memory. For some reason it coincided with a period when Gerald and I were seeing fewer people than usual. The children – if one could call them that now – rarely came home, and they didn’t while Jack was with us. Gerald was working on a big project and putting in extra hours at the office. I was trying to prepare for an exhibition, and it wasn’t going well. And then there was Jack himself, who gave the impression that he was more than happy with his own company.
That’s one reason why going to the pub is vivid in the memory – because it was the only time we went during Jack’s visit. It was Gerald’s idea. We decided we would eat there as well, so no one would have to cook supper.
‘Do Jack good,’ Gerald murmured. ‘He needs to get out of himself a bit, don’t you think?’
‘Maybe he won’t want to come.’
‘Only one way to find out.’
To my surprise, Jack was enthusiastic. ‘One condition, though,’ he said. ‘My treat. All right?’
‘There’s no need.’
‘Yes there is.’
I smiled at him. ‘OK. Thank you. By the way, how’s that scratch?’
His left hand covered the place where it was, underneath the shirt. ‘It’s fine, thanks. Much better.’
We walked down to the village, which was nearly a mile from our cottage and its neighbours. Daylight lingered, though the sky was already pricked with stars. We walked in line along the lane, with Gerald swinging the torch from side to side.
Halfway down, a pair of eyes glowed with reflected torchlight at the foot of the hedgerow.
‘What’s that?’ Jack said, his voice sharper than usual.
‘Rabbit, probably,’ I said.
‘Or a cat,’ Gerald said.
‘More likely rabbit,’ I said.
Imperceptibly we increased our speed. Or rather Jack did, and Gerald and I matched the pace he set. We pounded down the rest of the hill and walked through the village to the pub.
There was a log fire in the saloon bar – it was cold enough for the fire to be more than decorative – and we settled at a table in the corner nearby. Jack fetched the first round of drinks and the menus. He and Gerald wrangled amiably about who would pay and Jack won.
We took our time over the meal and drank more than usual. The outing had a celebratory feel – we’d spent so much time at home or, in Gerald’s case, at work, that any break in routine was like an adventure.
Gradually the bar filled with people. The food wasn’t brilliant but the place suited me. The landlord had a taste for jazz and played it with the volume low. We had Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges that evening. There was another bar on the side of the building with a huge TV for sports, as well as fruit machines and a pool table.
We finished eating and were in the pleasantly comatose state that follows a big meal. There was a couple we knew by sight at the next table – we had exchanged greetings earlier but avoided conversation. Since our own conversation had faltered for the time being, we automatically began to eavesdrop on theirs.
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‘It’s like UFOs,’ the man was saying. ‘Or yetis. You hear all these stories. But there’s nothing to them when you start to investigate scientifically. It’s always what someone else said they saw. Or there’s a perfectly simple explanation.’
‘But don’t they think yetis are real now?’ said his wife.
‘Nonsense.’
‘But they do. There was a TV programme about it. Don’t they think it’s probably some sort of bear?’
‘Well, yes, maybe. But that doesn’t mean the cats are real. Any more than UFOs are.’
‘As far as we know. But if there were going to be wild cats in England, the Forest is where they’d be.’
Jack had his back to the couple but I knew he was listening to them by the way he was staring at his empty plate with such fixed attention.
‘Coffee?’ Gerald said. ‘Or perhaps another drink? Another half won’t hurt.’
He went up to the bar. The firelight flickered on Jack’s downturned face and glinted on his glasses.
‘Anyway,’ the woman behind him said, ‘these aren’t cranks.’ She tapped a newspaper between them. ‘These are just Forestry workers. It’s not as if they were looking for big cats.’
‘Come on,’ her husband said, ‘the match will be starting in ten minutes.’
They went through to the other bar, taking their newspaper with them. Jack slowly relaxed. He glanced at me.
‘Did you hear that?’
I nodded.
‘I told you – the paw prints I saw at the quarry. Spion Kop. It’s not just me, is it?’
‘I wouldn’t pay much attention to what they were saying. There are always these stories. The Forest is full of them.’
‘Paw prints. I saw them. My phone died on me or I would have taken a photo.’
I shrugged.
The skin tightened over his jaw. ‘You don’t believe me?’
‘Of course I do. I believe you saw something. It’s just that I think it’s unlikely the prints belonged to a big wild cat.’
‘What were those people looking at? A newspaper?’
‘Yes – the local freebie. It comes out today. The landlord might have a copy.’
Without a word, Jack got up and went over to the bar, where Gerald was putting our drinks on a tray. When they came back together, Jack was carrying a copy of the newspaper.
Gerald glanced at the headline. ‘Ah – that old chestnut. Wild cats. They come round every two or three years. I reckon local papers have a sort of carousel of favourite stories they keep recycling. Like the boar. Or council cuts. Or the winner of the beautiful baby competition.’
Jack smoothed out the paper on the table. The headline kept it simple: BIG CATS TERROR. The picture showed a dark shape moving across a patch of open ground fringed with trees. It wasn’t a close-up shot. The animal looked about fifty yards away from the photographer, who had probably taken the picture with his phone.
It was impossible to tell how big the animal was, or even what it was. It could have been a cat. Whether it was a big cat or not is another question. For all the evidence to the contrary, it could have been Cannop.
‘It’s the same picture too,’ Gerald was saying. ‘It’s the one they always use.’
The terror in the headline was apparently the emotion felt by two girls, aged nine and twelve, who had seen a cat-like animal prowling on the fringe of some woodland near their house. ‘They’ve hardly slept since they saw it,’ their mother had confided to the reporter. ‘The doctor’s put them on medication.’
Last week, two Forestry Commission workers had found the remains of a deer near Crabtree Hill. It looked as if it had been clawed and bitten by a large animal. It had been partly eaten. On the day after, a cyclist from Birmingham claimed to have seen a panther-like animal crossing the track in front of him. He wasn’t able to take a photo of it but he did find a paw print, or part of one, in a patch of soft mud on the verge of the track, and he had taken a picture of that.
The paw print was reproduced on an inside page, along with the other less interesting parts of the story. Pride of place went to the cyclist’s trainer, included to give a sense of scale. You could hardly see the paw print beside it. There was what might have been part of the three-lobed heel pad that cats have, together with three of the four claw pads at the front of the paw.
‘That’s exactly what I saw at Spion Kop,’ Jack said. ‘Only mine was clearer. It was about that size too. Maybe three or four inches across. Just like that.’
Gerald’s eyes met mine. I had told him about the paw print Jack thought he had seen. I gave a shake of my head, trying to warn Gerald off.
For once he took the hint. ‘I guess we’ll never know for sure,’ he said. He glanced at his watch. ‘Anything on TV tonight? Or we could watch the rugby in the other bar.’
‘No – let’s don’t,’ I said. ‘Unless you want to, Jack?’
‘Whatever you like.’
‘I don’t want to leave it too late,’ Gerald said. ‘Another early start tomorrow. Whoever invented breakfast meetings ought to be shot. But I should be home earlier – probably about four.’
So we finished our drinks and walked back. Usually I enjoy the walk – it’s long enough to deal with the lethargy of the alcohol; and, once the lights of the village drop away, there’s something restful about plodding up a familiar lane in the near-darkness.
Gerald was ahead of us, swinging the torch. He was telling us about the hotel where they were having the breakfast meeting, throwing the words over his shoulder to us – ‘It’s a foul place; everything’s grubby, and it has the worst coffee you ever tasted.’
I felt something brush my right leg, just above the ankle. I glanced down in time to see a flicker of movement, a dark shadow in the darkness, between Jack and me.
Jack stumbled. He plunged forward and landed on his hands and knees in the middle of the lane. He swore. There was a faint rustle in the hedgerow.
Gerald and I were beside him in an instant. But he pushed us away and scrambled up by himself. He was panting as if he had been running.
‘You all right?’ I said.
‘It’s the local cider,’ Gerald said. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s deceptive.’
He ignored us both. ‘It tripped me up.’
‘What did?’ Gerald said.
‘The cat. Didn’t you see it?’
‘What cat?’
‘I felt something,’ I said. ‘Just before you fell. It could have been a cat.’
Gerald panned the beam from side to side, sliding it along the bottom of the hedges.
‘Not just a cat,’ Jack said. ‘It was Cannop.’
The strange thing – or rather one of the strange things – about what happened next was that they seemed not to affect Gerald – only Jack and me, and in different ways.
I noticed it first that same evening. When we got home, Jack said goodnight and went to the Hovel, and Gerald decided that he might as well catch the last of the rugby despite his having to get up early. I made myself some peppermint tea and went into the studio.
I turned on Radio Three and slumped on one end of the sofa. Directly in front of me was a piece I was working on. I had been thinking about the textural differences in pieces of bark collected from the Forest and I had created an abstract painting based on these. At this stage it was almost monochrome and I had been wondering whether to introduce more colour into the work.
I was concentrating on the picture. My left hand was beside me on the seat of the sofa. I felt Cannop’s fur against my little finger. I was thinking about the music from the radio in an unfocused way, too. It had slow, unfamiliar rhythms that originated a long way from Europe. They had an almost hypnotic effect. No doubt the alcohol helped, too.
A minute part of my consciousness was still aware of Cannop, aware of his warmth on my skin and aware of the way his fur was both soft and very faintly abrasive at the same time. I glanced at him.
But Cannop wasn’t there.
I was alone on the sofa, alone in the studio. I sat up with a jerk. The studio door was closed. So was the window. I remembered putting Cannop outside before we went to the pub. I remembered locking the cat flap in the kitchen door. I was sure that he hadn’t come into the house when we had returned. Since Jack had come to stay I had become much more aware than usual of Cannop’s presence or absence.
But I had felt his familiar fur beside me on the sofa. I knew that as well as I knew my own name.
And I also knew it was impossible that he had been in the room.
6
Jack came in for breakfast after Gerald had gone to work. He hadn’t slept well, he said, when I made the usual polite enquiries. We talked about other things for a while but then he said, out of the blue, ‘The cat got into the Hovel.’
‘What? Cannop did?’
‘I saw him. He was there when I got in yesterday evening. I opened the door and he sort of sneaked out.’
‘But how did he get inside in the first place?’
‘I don’t know. I spent half the night looking, and trying to figure it out. But I can’t.’
‘Perhaps he slipped in when you went out?’
Jack shook his head. ‘I’m really careful. I know he can’t get in.’
The certainty in his voice told me something. I tried to make a joke of it: ‘You’ve cat-proofed the Hovel, have you?’
‘Yes,’ he said, without the hint of a smile. ‘He couldn’t get in. But he did.’
‘I wouldn’t worry too much. You were probably distracted by something else when you came out to go to the pub. Just for a second. That’s all it would take.’
‘But he was in the lane,’ Jack said. ‘Don’t you see? That means he couldn’t have got inside when I was going out. He must have gone straight in there after he tripped me up.’
‘We don’t know it was Cannop that tripped you up. We didn’t actually see him, did we?’
‘It was him. I know it was.’
‘Never mind. I tell you what, we’ll have a good look round the Hovel and see if there’s any way he could get in. Just in case. Two pairs of eyes are better than one.’
‘OK. Now?’
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