Fireside Gothic

by Andrew Taylor

  I shook my head. ‘It’ll have to be after lunch. I’ve got to go into town this morning to talk to someone who is redesigning my website. And then I’m seeing the accountant, and I’m not looking forward to it.’

  Jack smiled at me. ‘Sorry. I’m being a pain.’

  ‘It’s no trouble,’ I said, which was untrue.

  ‘I’ll have to find a way to make up for it.’

  He was still smiling, but something in his expression had changed. My face felt unnaturally stiff, as if the muscles had frozen with the effort of not moving in the wrong way. Suddenly the wretched cat was unimportant. It didn’t matter whether Cannop had sneaked into the Hovel or whether I had felt his fur against my finger. There was only one thing that mattered. The awkward fact that I didn’t want to stop looking at Jack.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, anyway, I’d better get on. See you at lunchtime.’

  It took an effort of will to leave the room. I went up to the bathroom and bolted the door. I stared at my reflection in the mirror over the basin.

  ‘No,’ I whispered to myself. ‘This can’t be happening.’

  I didn’t go home for lunch. I bought a tuna sandwich and a bottle of water. I sat in the car under a grey sky and stared at the other cars in the car park. I watched tired women carrying shopping and old men smoking cigarettes. I watched mothers with pushchairs, and kids trying to impress each other. I watched young men in suits and young women with firm flesh and unlined skin.

  I watched people Jack’s age.

  All this time, I tried not to think about him. But of course I did. He was Gerald’s nephew. I didn’t know how old he was and I was afraid to ask. I guessed he was at least fifteen or even twenty years younger than I was. Possibly more. I was happily married and I had grown-up children. I was not, and never had been, the sort of woman who had affairs.

  For God’s sake, Jack was nothing to write home about. He was barely more than a boy. He was emotionally unstable, or at least vulnerable, which meant there was all the more reason for me to behave like a responsible adult. I didn’t love him. I wasn’t sure I even liked him. But for some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

  Absolutely nothing had happened. Or rather, whatever had happened this morning in the kitchen, such as it was, had been confined to my own head. And – to be perfectly honest – body. That was the way it would stay. It occurred to me – and at this point I felt unaccountably depressed – that there was no reason why he should feel anything in return. This was all about me. Besides – and at this point my depression grew even worse as I returned to the age gap between us – I was old enough to be his mother.

  I talked myself round and round in circles. I had to do something. I couldn’t stay in the car park for ever. I couldn’t go home, either, so I went for a walk in the Forest.

  Usually, this was a calming thing to do, but not this time. I must have walked five or six miles, following paths I had never followed before wherever I could, but never quite losing myself. At first I walked slowly, but my pace gradually accelerated until I was walking as fast as I could without breaking into a run. In this time I saw one or two walkers, and a solitary cyclist. I startled half a dozen fallow deer, which bounced into the undergrowth as if their legs were on springs.

  I couldn’t throw off the sense that I was never, ever alone. They say we know when we are being watched, that this is a half-buried characteristic from our primitive past as a species. Whoever, or whatever, was watching me was not doing it in a particularly menacing way – I didn’t know how I knew this, but I did – but with a steady, unflinching attention.

  I set traps for whatever it was, assuming it existed. I doubled back without warning. I glanced from side to side. Occasionally I thought I might have glimpsed a dark shadow, close to the ground, flickering among the trees. Perhaps my conscience was pursuing me. Or Nemesis. But I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  I waited until after four o’clock before going home. Gerald was coming home early today. I yearned for him, for his safe, dependable presence. He would act as a sort of lightning conductor, diverting this destructive impulse into a neutral place where it could be made harmless.

  When I reached the house, however, Gerald’s car wasn’t parked outside. I delved in my bag for my phone. There was a text from him that had arrived while I was walking in the Forest.

  Sorry. Meeting with Brian at 5. Back 7ish? xx

  I started the engine again. But it was too late. Jack had come through the gate from the top garden. He was smiling at me. I turned off the engine and lowered the window.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ he said. ‘I was expecting you at lunchtime.’

  ‘I got held up.’ I wondered if he had noticed my turning on the engine again and then turning it off. ‘I should have phoned.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ He was fizzing and crackling like a firework. His hair was even more of a mess than usual. I wanted to touch it, to find out what it felt like.

  I said, ‘Did you find something to eat?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He waved his hand as if brushing away the very idea of food. ‘Clare, I saw it. The wild cat. I took a photo.’

  ‘Oh. Where?’

  ‘At Spion Kop, of course. It was on the floor of the quarry. It must be living there. It’s big, too, really big. I think it’s a panther. It’s certainly not a domestic runaway.’

  He opened the door, so I had to leave the shelter of the car. He took my bag.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You just won’t believe it.’

  I followed him along the path to the front door. Once again I felt the sensation of being watched. I glanced up. Cannop was sitting on the landing windowsill. He was looking down at us.

  The photograph was a disappointment. When he came home, Gerald got it up on his laptop. We sat round the kitchen table, looking at it in turn.

  ‘I see what you’re getting at.’ His finger stabbed at the screen, once, then twice. ‘That could be a shoulder. And that could be the hind legs.’

  ‘I saw it,’ Jack said. ‘I saw it move.’

  Gerald nodded. ‘Yes. But the trouble is, that tree trunk’s in the way, so you can’t even be sure the two bits are connected. And then there’s that lump of stone, so you can’t see the head. Or where the head would be.’

  ‘It’s hard to tell the scale,’ I said.

  Jack spread his arms wide. ‘That big. At least.’

  ‘So does that mean it’s young? Don’t they grow larger than that? If it is a panther.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ He ran his fingers through his hair, which was wiry, like he was, and needed cutting. ‘Panthers aren’t a separate species. They’re usually just one of the bigger cats with the melanistic colour variant that makes their fur black.’

  As Jack went on, Gerald and I exchanged glances across the table. Most couples develop a private marital shorthand, a form of communication that doesn’t always need words. We were both thinking that Jack was just a boy really, however old his birth certificate said he was. His enthusiasm for the subject and his burning desire to tell us about it reminded me of our son when he was in the grip of a new interest. So did Jack’s mild air of condescension while he lectured us. I knew Gerald was thinking the same.

  It led me to think how close he and I were, for all our silences and differences, and how much we shared that could never be shared with anyone else. It also made me think how all this didn’t really change anything – I still found it heartbreakingly endearing when Jack ran his fingers through his hair and made it stand up in a clump of curly spikes. And I still found it hard to look away from his neck and its junction with his shoulders. God alone knew why. It seemed such a vulnerable place.

  ‘That’s all very well,’ Gerald said, ‘but just because panthers exist, it doesn’t mean we have one here. If only you’d had a proper camera with you. One with a decent zoom lens.’

  Jack said, ‘I know what I saw. A big black cat, at least a metre long.’

  ‘Yes.’ G
erald nodded at the screen. ‘But I’m afraid this won’t convince anyone. Not unless they’re a convert already.’

  ‘Could you lend me a camera?’

  ‘Clare’s got one.’

  Jack turned to me, his face eager and alert. ‘Would you let me borrow it?’

  ‘Sure.’ To tell the truth, I was reluctant to lend it to anyone, let alone someone who was going to take it on safari with him. ‘But you will take care of it? I use it for work.’

  ‘Of course.’ He flashed a smile at me.

  ‘And you take care too, won’t you?’ I said awkwardly. ‘Just in case it is a wild cat and it doesn’t like humans.’

  After supper, Jack went to the Hovel, taking the camera with him. Gerald and I watched TV, side by side on the sofa with Cannop squashed between us. There was a historical documentary on BBC Four. It had unconvincing dramatic reconstructions that were meant to be funny and a presenter with artfully dishevelled hair and a motorbike.

  ‘Why is he so interested?’ Gerald said out of the blue.

  ‘Jack? You mean in cats?’

  ‘If he’s got a phobia about them, it just doesn’t make sense. You’d think he’d try to avoid them. Look what he’s like with Cannop.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it makes a difference that this one at the quarry is out in the Forest, that it’s wild.’ My fingertips burrowed into Cannop’s fur. ‘Unlike this little horror. Anyway, aren’t fear and fascination just different sides of the same thing?’

  Gerald lowered his voice, quite unnecessarily. ‘I don’t think it exists.’

  I glanced at him. ‘He thinks he’s seen something.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean it’s real.’ Gerald hesitated. ‘I’m wondering if he’s more disturbed than he seems. There was nothing remotely cat-like in that photograph. Perhaps he’s hallucinating.’

  ‘He had a bad time in Afghanistan. I told you – having his friend blown up beside him.’

  ‘But what’s that got to do with cats?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  I hadn’t told Gerald about Jack’s belief that Cannop was somehow finding his way into the Hovel. I wasn’t keeping it from him – of course not – but there just hadn’t been an opportunity. When I’d come home this afternoon, Jack hadn’t mentioned the idea of our examining the Hovel together to see if we could find a way in that Cannop might have used. I decided not to say anything about it now. There was no point in complicating matters. Perhaps Jack had forgotten all about it. If I told Gerald now it would only make him think that Jack was even more unbalanced than he already suspected. Time enough to tell him when and if Jack brought up the subject again.

  That was how I reasoned it out to myself. It seemed logical enough at the time. How we tell lies to ourselves.

  We went to bed early that night too. Usually, Gerald couldn’t tear himself away from a historical documentary – he adored being rude about the presenter and arguing with the experts who are produced to lend a tincture of scholarship to the programme. But not this one. At the time it didn’t seem in any way significant, any more than the helpfulness with the chores had done.

  We went upstairs. Gerald was the first in bed. I pottered about, putting away clothes, while he was reading. As I went to the window to draw the curtains, I glanced at him.

  ‘You OK? You seem very quiet.’

  He raised his eyes from the book. ‘I’m fine. Just tired.’

  He went on reading. Perhaps I should have probed more. But I didn’t, because I wanted to look out of the window, which looked down the garden to the Hovel and the dark mass of the Forest beyond. I wanted to see if there was still a light in the window of the upper room of the Hovel. I put my face close to the glass.

  The Hovel was in darkness. But the light from our bedroom window made a faint, radiant wedge on the grass beneath.

  A black shadow cut through the wedge moving from the cottage towards the Hovel and the Forest. Cannop was on the prowl. I think it was Cannop.

  When I got into bed I didn’t read. I said goodnight and turned away, leaving Gerald alone with his book.

  I wasn’t exactly happy that night. I was anxious, excited and a little afraid. I was heavy with anticipation, though I wasn’t sure what I was anticipating or even what I wanted. But all this added up to an emotional cocktail that was curiously like happiness. As I lay in bed, curled away from Gerald, I hugged it to myself like a guilty secret. Except that there was nothing to be guilty about because I had done nothing wrong.

  7

  Next morning, Gerald went into work early again. I had breakfast with him and made a start in the studio. In the light of day, the excitement I had felt the previous evening seemed unreal. There was no sign of Jack, which wasn’t unusual. He had a kettle, water and tea at the Hovel, as well as a variety of high-energy cereal bars. Perhaps he had gone out at the crack of dawn to stake out the quarry with the camera.

  For the rest of the morning, I hardly thought of him. That might seem odd. But, being an artist had this in its favour: it had the power to push almost anything else to the margins of the mind.

  Jack still hadn’t put in an appearance when I broke off for lunch. By this stage I had persuaded myself that I had put yesterday’s events behind me; they had been an emotional anomaly, best forgotten.

  I made myself a sandwich and took it outside to the bench. It was one of those improbably warm and sunny days you sometimes get in March. In a sheltered spot, you can make yourself believe you are on the edge of summer. I ate slowly, my eyes half-closed against the glare. Part of me relished the solitude. Even Cannop could be an intruder sometimes. He always wanted something, if only for me to feed him or provide a lap for him to doze on or just to give something for him to watch through his heavy-lidded eyes.

  I was almost asleep when I heard Jack scream. The sound sliced through me. The plate slid from my lap to the ground, where it shattered on the flagstone in front of the bench. I dropped the remains of my sandwich among the fragments and ran towards the Hovel.

  He was standing just outside the door of the upper room of the Hovel, at the head of the flight of stone steps that lead down to the garden path. He was wearing muddy jeans and a torn T-shirt. The door was open. He was staring into the room beyond.

  My camera was lying at the foot of the steps. It wasn’t in its case.

  ‘Jack,’ I called. ‘Jack – what is it?’

  He gave no sign he had heard me. I ran up the steps. He wasn’t even aware of my presence until I laid my hand on his arm. It was the arm with the scratch on it.

  He turned his head to me. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Look – it’s got inside and killed something.’

  Still holding him, I looked through the doorway at his sleeping bag on the camping mattress. It was almost entirely obliterated by a sea of feathers. They were white, grey, black and even a sort of blue. There were spots of blood, too. The colours were beautiful.

  ‘Clare,’ Jack said. ‘I just can’t stand it.’

  He turned towards me. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know which of us made the first move. Not that it mattered any more.

  The need for comfort, to give it and receive it, is the Trojan horse of the emotions. Once the horse is inside the walls of the city, the walls no longer matter.

  We went into the Hovel, despite the feathers, despite the blood. The old mattress, the stained, lumpy one that had been there for years, was still propped against the wall, waiting for me to arrange for someone to take it to the dump. Jack dragged it to the floor, creating a draught that made the feathers flutter and dance on his sleeping bag. He pulled me on top of him, and we did what had to be done.

  The old-fashioned word for it is lust. It was a desperate, harsh emotion that pulled us together and made us tear at each other’s clothes. There was an inevitability to it, a sense that I was powerless. As his hands were tugging at my belt, I had time to think, with a sense of horrified wonder, ‘But I’m old enough to be his mother.’

  A
fter that there wasn’t any time for thought. We writhed and heaved on the dirty mattress that smelled of damp and dust. Nothing else existed except the need to do what we were doing. It was, I suppose, a sort of temporary death.

  Afterwards we lay still for a moment. The door was still open. I heard birdsong.

  Jack pulled on his T-shirt. He gave a cry of pain. I glanced at him. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. He was looking at his arm, where the scratch seemed more swollen than before. The wound had opened up. There were spots of blood on the mattress and even on the sleeve of my shirt.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to do something about that.’

  He turned aside, fumbling for his glasses. I scrambled off the mattress and began to pull on my jeans.

  ‘It’s infected,’ I said. ‘Anyone with half an eye can see that. You’re being ridiculous – you’re just letting it get worse.’

  I was furious with him, with his stupidity. Really, of course, I was furious with myself: and it was the worst sort of anger, the sort that has a dark undertone of guilt.

  Jack stared up at me. He had his glasses on now, which made him look half-grown and defenceless, like a baby owl. He was only wearing his T-shirt and his naked legs were thin, pale and hairy. The eyes behind the glasses were magnified and moist. He was on the verge of tears.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Get dressed. We’ve got to tidy up.’

  He didn’t move. ‘I’ve had it since Afghanistan. Since the cave.’

  ‘Had what?’ I was buttoning up my shirt with feverish haste and trying to avoid looking at him.

  ‘This,’ he said. ‘The scratch.’

  My jersey was inside out. It fought my attempt to put it on every step of the way.

  ‘When the mine went off,’ he said, ‘I was inside the cave. It brought down the hillside above. On top of Simon.’

  I looked at Jack. Simon his friend. Simon with the wife and kids.

  ‘Look – I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I truly am. But could you please get dressed before we talk about this?’

  Jack said, ‘I was inside the cave. Don’t you see? I was trapped. I thought I’d be there for ever. That’s why I don’t much like sleeping in houses any more. That’s why I don’t much like trains or planes or even cars, unless I’m driving. That’s why I wanted to sleep here.’ He waved his hand in a gesture that encompassed the Hovel. ‘It’s not like a house. It’s not enclosed in the same way.’ His eyes returned to me. ‘And it’s all mine.’