Winter

by William Horwood

  ‘I would die a happy man,’ Arthur often said as they sat shoulder to shoulder watching the setting sun, ‘if I could only get out of my head that I have been here before. I would also be happier to find the answer to the question that has eluded us both so long.’

  ‘Ah, yes, that!’ sighed Margaret, still as baffled as she had always been.

  For Uffington Hill was also called White Horse Hill, which had given its name to the great vale that spread before them to north and east and west, giving them the impression that they surveyed a nearly magical world all their own. But it made no sense. The name was meant to derive from the fact that there had once been a figure of a beautiful horse cut into the turf on the escarpment. Now there was no horse there at all and according to their considerable researches there never had been. If it had once been there, all trace of it was now gone.

  ‘If only,’ Arthur would say, the last rays of the sun on his cheerful ruddy cheeks, and making his beard as white as snow, ‘I knew what it had looked like. How much easier to imagine it!’

  ‘And to follow it, my love, for a horse does not stand still for long. It goes somewhere, I suppose. Do you imagine that our horse, if we ever found it, would walk or canter?’

  ‘I think it would probably gallop like hell,’ said Arthur, ‘anxious to get to a better place than this old world of ours! But come on, down the hill once more, I have work to do!’

  It was a conversation they continued to have many times in many different ways until, one day, three years into Arthur’s retirement, a girl of fourteen came into their lives who changed everything.

  It happened when the work on the phenomenon of déjà vu had produced an interesting result. Arthur had been able to show that experiences of déjà vu were connected with what he called discontinuities of time. In other words, people who thought they had experienced things before often reported a gain or loss of actual time as a result of the experience.

  From this he looked more carefully at apparent time shifts in the geological record from the prehistoric Pleistocene to the Holocene and on into the historical record. Time shifts, if that’s what they were, seemed to be associated with major discontinuities in history, when the speed of events, or the direction they took, suddenly changed dramatically and without apparent reason.

  ‘Of course,’ he said over dinner one evening when he was full of these ideas, ‘conventional historians earn their money finding reasons why quite extraordinary changes had to happen when, actually, they easily might not have. The decline of the Roman Empire; the Renaissance; and in our own time the Holocaust or even, dare I say it, the radical changes in Western society in our own lifetime we have experienced. Were these things really inevitable? Or are they the result of discontinuities and time shifts which, had they gone a different way, might have produced very different societies than the one we are now in?

  ‘From that we might argue . . .’

  ‘Arthur, please, you are boring our guests.’

  ‘Ah . . . yes . . . I’m sorry, I get carried away . . . now what exactly . . . I mean to say, what is it that . . . ?’

  The guests in question were not quite welcome ones.

  The next-door neighbours, who had connections with the Scout and Guiding movement, had a small troop of Guides camping in their garden. Two of them had been invited over by Margaret along with the neighbours. Both were fourteen and in the presence of Arthur, and despite Margaret’s gentle enquires, they had remained more or less tongue-tied. This explained Arthur’s volubility, for he found the silence and lack of conversation very awkward and, not knowing how to talk to teenage girls, he had filled it with his own voice.

  ‘So . . .’ he said, as Margaret turned to one and he to the other, ‘have you been here before . . . um . . . er . . . I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name?’

  ‘Kate.’

  ‘Have you been here before?’

  They stared at each other, her eyes wide.

  ‘No, I . . .’

  ‘You haven’t, then? Well it is . . .’

  ‘I mean I . . .’

  ‘You have! Ah . . .’

  ‘Do you know,’ she suddenly asked, somehow cutting through everything, ‘why it is called White Horse Hill?’

  It would be hard to say what it was about the tone of her voice, or the way she looked, or, from the others’ perspective, what it was about Arthur and Kate together that stilled the room and silenced everyone.

  ‘I . . . am . . . not . . . sure . . .’

  ‘Kate’s got a thing about white horses,’ said her friend.

  The silence deepened, yet not awkwardly. It was as if there was a comfortableness about it, and Arthur, his heart beating faster, for the first time in years had a feeling of déjà vu.

  ‘Do you?’ he said.

  The friend said, ‘She carries one around with her everywhere.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Arthur. ‘I mean . . . do you mean . . . have you got it with you now?’

  ‘I could get it,’ said Kate and before they could stop her she was up and out of the room, out of the front door, running through the dark from one house to another, into her tent, grabbing her horse, and running back again, breathless, her hair dishevelled, the cloth horse in her hand.

  She laid it on their great big dining table among the empty sweet dishes, the used glasses and the faded napkins. It was old and worn and it had a long, lean body like a single brushstroke, galloping legs, a head and pricked ears and a single eye. It was, beyond question, as prehistoric as a megalith but infinitely more beautiful.

  ‘Where did you get it?’ asked Arthur.

  ‘A boy gave it to her,’ said her friend grinning.

  Kate grinned back.

  There was an air of profound ease and comfort in the room.

  For the first time in her life Margaret Foale felt like a mother, which was inexplicable.

  As for Arthur, all stiffness had gone.

  ‘What was his name?’ he asked.

  ‘Jack,’ she replied.

  The horse galloped between them, full of life.

  ‘I think,’ said Arthur, ‘that I would very much like to talk to your Jack.’

  Your Jack.

  For the first time Kate flushed, but she didn’t mind.

  ‘So would I,’ she said.

  48

  JACK

  He came with the slow and steady inevitability of a change in weather after a period of unnatural quiet, so that, when he finally arrived at Woolstone they were all expecting him one way or another. It was his manner of arrival that was the surprise.

  Kate had moved in, which felt as natural to the Foales as breathing. She had been fostered after her parents were killed in a car accident when she was six, the same day that she said she met the boy called Jack and acquired the toy horse.

  ‘He gave it to me in my father’s surgery in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, without me asking, but I knew why. It was protection and it worked. I asked his name. He said it was Jack. He asked for mine. I said “Katherine”. I knew I’d meet him again one day and I still believe that.’

  The fostering had been happy enough but Katherine, as she decided they should call her, was always restless.

  ‘I felt I was not where I should be. They said it was because I missed my parents but they were a blur and Jack wasn’t. That night of the crash when our car burst into flames I was holding the horse and it leapt from my hand and told me to follow it outside. I crawled after it through the broken window because it galloped away so fast I thought I’d lose it. I thought it would take me to Jack but it didn’t. Yet I believed I’d find him one day.’

  Katherine was a bright girl with a social conscience. Guiding, volunteering, raising money were what she chose to do.

  ‘Got me out of the house, away from them. They were just . . . dull. I was never their child and I feel mean for saying that. I didn’t belong. The White Horse was where I belonged so I collected white horses. It was only a matter of time before someone mentioned White H
orse Hill and Uffington. I chose where to come for the camping. The first thing we did was climb the hill. When I stood up there I felt I was home.

  ‘When I came to this house for the first time I knew I had been here before. The hill was home, this was my shelter. And Jack . . . well, he was coming. Whe— If he does . . .’

  ‘You mean “When he does”, I think,’ said Margaret.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When he comes,’ said Arthur, ‘I shall ask him a great many questions.’

  Katherine smiled her lovely smile. It lit up a face which, in repose, expressed the depth of the loss she had suffered when so young. Confident and warm outside, unsure and a little prickly within.

  ‘When he comes,’ she said, ‘I shall give him back the horse. He only loaned it to me to do a job, which it did.’

  Sometimes Katherine played her music too loud.

  Sometimes she got angry and shouted.

  Sometimes she banged doors.

  Sometimes she went back to see her foster parents because, as the months went by, she understood that they would like it, dull though they might be to her.

  Sometimes she sat by herself in the garden, listening to the Chimes and not minding when Arthur joined her; and Margaret watched them and let them be, three people who by chance, as it seemed, knew how to be at peace together.

  And once she said, ‘I’m very tired and a bit frightened of what was, what might be. I think time’s running out.’

  When Jack came it was autumn after a dry summer and the grass on the hill was husky grey-yellow, the evenings balmy.

  Margaret was finding it hard to climb straight up the hill any more so when she came they took the easier zig-zag way. Up to the top, along the Ridgeway to Wayland’s Smithy, standing there, listening to the rush of the breeze in the great circle of trees, and then back for the traditional stop, which was under the hawthorn tree in the lee of the ramparts, the edge of the escarpment about fifteen yards away.

  It was along the edge he came, striding purposefully with a big stick, which made Arthur notice him.

  ‘Alpenstock,’ he muttered. ‘I have one. Edelweiss. We enjoyed ourselves.’

  ‘That was a long time ago,’ murmured Margaret, ‘and the “we” didn’t include me.’

  ‘Was that before your time, my love?’ said Arthur ingenuously, patting her thigh.

  But by then Katherine was not listening, she was staring with fascinated alarm at the young male walker with a stick. She was waiting for him to turn one way or another so she could see his profile. As it was he stood staring out into what, from where they sat, looked like infinite space.

  For him too, the Vale of the White Horse, for miles and miles, seemed a magical land.

  He stood like a rock, a feeling made more real by the skylark high, high over his head, right up there, singing and fluttering so hard that eventually he looked up.

  Jack stared, put a hand to his eyes to shield them against the afternoon glare and then, still though he had been, he became yet more still. His hand dropped down, he looked back along the edge as if he had just registered he had lost something, like a glove or a map. He looked puzzled, he shook his head, and then, glimpsing the tree from the corner of his eye, he turned and looked at them.

  By then they were as astonished as Katherine – and as him as well, it seemed. Fearful too, as if the world had just changed.

  Then, without seeming to think it odd in any way, he came closer and stared at them for a moment and then came nearer still.

  Finally, he was about fifteen feet away and paying no attention at all to Arthur or Margaret, he said, ‘Hello, Katherine.’

  ‘Hello, Jack.’

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said and she stood up and gave him the white horse which she had carried for so long in her backpack for just this moment and which already, while she was staring at him, she had taken from her pack.

  He took it as easily as she gave it.

  He looked at it, ran his hands over it as she had a million times and he said, ‘I’ve missed it.’

  Katherine felt she was there and wasn’t there.

  She felt her heart like it was a hammer inside.

  She could hardly breathe.

  Jack just the same.

  ‘I would like you both to meet an old friend,’ she managed to say finally, rather stiffly but with a lot of charm. ‘Arthur, Margaret, this is Jack.’

  He shook their hands firmly.

  ‘You will come to supper,’ commanded Margaret, which made him laugh.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, as if he were a US Marine.

  ‘And I . . .’ began Arthur.

  ‘He,’ said Katherine, ‘has a lot of questions.’

  When they got to the house, sorted out that Jack would camp in the garden, got food onto the table and told each other about themselves, Jack finally raised the question most on his mind.

  ‘What do you know about Mister Boots?’ he asked.

  49

  TESTIMONY

  Arthur had never heard of Mister Boots and nor had Katherine.

  Maybe if they still had television then, or Arthur had continued to travel abroad, they might have come across him. But they had not, and that first night and in the weeks following as his stay with them extended until finally it became more permanent, Jack enlightened them by telling them what he had been able to find out about Mister Boots. From this, and the occasional mention of Mister Boots in the news, they came to believe and understand why it must be that he might be on his way to Woolstone. But they weren’t expecting his arrival any time soon. Mister Boots was a law unto himself in the nicest possible way.

  The trouble with Jack was that he was no storyteller. He was a doer rather than a talker. So his account of Mister Boots came out in fits and starts, and now and then, adding facts and ideas through time until eventually they decided it was easiest for Arthur to treat him like one of the subjects of his research into déjà vu and interview him.

  Which was right in a way, because where Boots was concerned an almost ungovernable and painful sense of déjà vu was what Jack was all about.

  Arthur had suffered the same intense kind of déjà vu when he came to Woolstone, and so had Katherine. It was as if people who shared something but which they had forgotten were congregating at Woolstone one by one for something important that still had to happen.

  ‘Maybe we’re all waiting for Mister Boots,’ said Jack one day.

  ‘Who’s waiting?’ wondered Arthur.

  ‘Maybe the whole world,’ said Katherine.

  ‘. . . and maybe it’s time to get all that Jack knows down,’ said Arthur, ‘and see what there is to learn from it.’

  So they recorded Jack, transcribed it, and Katherine put it into order. It’s as well she did, for it was a record of something that might otherwise have been lost and forgotten, like so much else about Mister Boots.

  I was raised on the North York Moors in England, where I was found one day outside a children’s home, Jack began. It wasn’t what people would call a real home: no parents, no place to call my own. Just that toy horse I gave to Katherine.

  I had nothing left of my past after that, so I hoped one day I’d see her again. Then I’d know my gift was one worth making and my loss worth suffering. From then on I was looking for somebody or some place or something I could attach to again.

  It was a craving, a yearning. It wasn’t a bad kind of feeling but I don’t think it was very good! It left me restless and dissatisfied.

  I would look at passers-by to see if they were the one. They never were. Later I would search illustrated books and magazines and old encyclopaedias to see if I could find the place. But I never did, maybe because I made the mistake of looking too far afield, thinking, like people do, that the grass is greener over there. It isn’t. I didn’t know the place I was looking for was nearer than I thought.

  Maybe if we had had television or later what they call the internet in some countries, I might ha
ve found my place sooner. But the consensus moved against those things in England and Western Europe and later in America, when it was realized that together they were a form of highly destructive mass addiction to passive lifestyles and pornography. True they were used under strict conditions for education and official communication but I myself never got to see and use them until I was nearly adult. I didn’t miss much but I did miss finding that place.

  As for finding something to attach to, that was easier. I collected stones and rocks; I collected labels off bottles and then the bottles themselves. There were bright-orange and green fishing floats; old coins; Enid Blyton books and then one day, one very special day, old Ordnance Survey maps, which are numbered from 1 to 204 in the edition I had, so they were very collectible.

  I found them in jumble sales and junk shops. I couldn’t afford to buy them new.

  They were no substitute for my horse, which I still missed, but they opened my mind to places in England, Scotland and Wales. Friends of mine read books; I read maps. They had stories, I had journeys. It wasn’t long before I went off to find the places on the maps near to me. That taught me to read them even better and make bolder journeys. I don’t mean real ones, because I only had a bike. I mean ones in my imagination.

  One day I bought some fish and chips in Scarborough, to where I had biked from our home with some friends. I was twelve.

  I’m told that before what our teachers called the Greening of Britain had begun in the early 1970s some shops had special paper in which they wrapped their fish and chips. Like wrapping paper, but creamy white. They gave up old newspaper, saying that it looked better.

  Well that was soon put a stop to. Why have special paper when you can re-use newspaper? Stupid.

  So anyway, there I was, sitting on the beach, and as I dug into my chips a headline caught my eye. It read: ‘Urban Legend “Boots” Turns up Briefly in Germany’. I had no idea what ‘Boots’ meant but Germany had always interested me. I didn’t know why but, whenever I saw that country’s name, or heard its language spoken, my inner ear pricked up.