Spring (16 page)

People very rarely stayed at Woolstone House, and when they did they were not usually male or, well . . .
Jack.

So Katherine, in a panic, had finally decided on the plain cream sheets and not the pink ones, and had changed the picture on the wall twice, in favour of a painting of boats.

When she couldn’t think of anything else she headed downstairs and into the garden.

‘Katherine, is that you?’

‘Yes, Mum.’

‘Where are you off to? It’s cold.’

‘I’m just going out into the garden.’

Mrs Foale, hearing Clare call out, came to see if she needed anything, and found her weeping.

‘What is it my dear?’ she asked, hugging her gently. She knew Clare was in almost constant pain, though she rarely complained, but certain small things upset her. Like her daughter not stopping to say hello before going out.

‘It’s Katherine,’ Clare whispered. ‘What’s she
doing
out there?’

Mrs Foale went to the conservatory doors, and watched Katherine wandering across the great garden, stopping sometimes to bend down to look at flowers, and then choose with care.

‘I think she’s finding something for Jack’s bedside table.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘She’s looking for the flowers of the Spring.’

T
hirty minutes after leaving the outskirts of London, Jack’s cab driver suddenly announced, ‘Now
that’s
a view!’ They were on a dual carriageway heading downhill through a steep-sided cutting excavated in chalk, whose sides framed the vast expanse of the Vale of Oxfordshire stretching ahead below them.

For Jack it seemed an unexpected portal to another world, because countryside like this was not something he had any previous experience of.

His first reaction was to wonder why the driver even bothered to comment on a landscape that looked so featureless and flat.

But then it drew him in, as at the beginning of a film, when the blank screen fills out and the action begins and all else is forgotten. Maybe it was the misty blue horizon, maybe some of the details he now began to see: an old farm building here, a church spire there, and then the shining silver ribbon of a stream reflecting the sky, and snaking away out of sight almost before he noticed it.

As they journeyed further, Jack began to realize he had been living in a city too long. He felt he had never seen such lush countryside before, not
this
type of countryside. Quiet villages, neat hedges, undulating fields, and stands of trees, their leaves already golden brown, while beyond them extended inner, shadowy, depths of woodland inviting exploration and discovery.

‘England can be a beautiful country,’ murmured the driver, as if picking up on his reverie.

Jack had to agree, as the earlier apprehension he had felt about this trip began to ease a little, replaced by a new excitement. He might not have seen this part of England before, but a memory of his brief childhood stay on the North Yorkshire Moors had come back, and before, vague though it was, another deeper memory of somewhere else: of mountains, biting cold air, and views across deep valleys. It put a yearning and restlessness into him that he could not explain but which made him feel alive in a way he hadn’t felt for a long time.

‘Mind you,’ added the driver, ‘
that
thing spoils it a bit.’ He pointed towards six great cooling towers, off to the left, from whose summits thick white steam billowed upwards into the sky.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Didcot Power Station, biggest of its kind in Europe. Spewing God knows what into the sky. We have to drive past it to get to where you’re heading, so you’ll get a closer look later. It’s not that far now before we turn off . . . Oops, spoke too soon, as usual!’

At that moment, the traffic news broke in automatically on the car radio, and the driver turned it up so they could listen. The traffic began to slow to a crawl, as the announcement warned of delays occurring just after Junction 6, caused by an obstruction on the highway somewhere further on.

‘No problem,’ said the driver cheerily. ‘We turn off at that junction anyway, so with luck we’ll miss the worst of it.’

With a sideways wink at Jack, he pressed the button on a hands-free earpiece.

‘Let’s see if I can find out what’s causing the obstruction.’

For a moment he listened in to some waveband chat he had linked to, and then switched his headpiece back on mute.

‘That’s a new one on me. It seems there’s a horse loose on the motorway, and the traffic’s backing up while they restrain it. Shouldn’t be too . . . no, it’s all right, here we go.’

The traffic ahead was starting to move, and a short time later they were able to turn left onto the slip road and head south, rapidly leaving the motorway behind.

‘Could have been worse. They must have got their horse.’

But they hadn’t, because Jack could see it through a gap in the hedge on his right and then a few more times after that, galloping parallel with them, keeping pace with the car, its coat an undulating white-grey sheen like the sky itself.

He lost sight of it then for a minute or two as the car turned a corner, before the hedge transmuted into a plain wire fence and then he could see it again, clear as anything, further off now but still magnificent. It veered nearer, was briefly lost to view again, and then was right in the field next to them, head pressed forward, muscles straining. But this time on their left side? That was strange.

‘It’s quite a horse,’ said the driver, who had caught sight of it again as well.

For just a few moments more the white horse was so close that Jack could clearly see its eyes and questing nostrils, and the long hair of its mane and tail flying behind it in the wind. He even imagined he could hear the thunder of its hoofs.

Then it disappeared again and, though he strained to glimpse it, and turned his head round and tried to see through the rear window, the view was obscured, and he saw it no more. Moments later the car slowed right down as they entered a large village.

Fifteen minutes later they reached their next turn-off, and took a series of minor roads across the Berkshire countryside.

‘We’re nearly there,’ said the driver, consulting his Satnav. The car turned smoothly between two big blue gateposts, paint peeling and standing crooked, the gate itself long gone. The wheels crunched over weed-filled gravel till they pulled to a halt in front of a great dilapidated house.

Jack climbed out of the cab and looked up five shallow stone steps to the double front door. One half of it suddenly opened and there stood Katherine, but looking nothing like he remembered her.

She was taller, her hair longer, and she was dressed differently from many of the London girls he knew: dowdy, sombre, serious.

‘Hello, Jack,’ she called out, her smile a bit crooked, her wave a little self-conscious.

He grabbed his backpack and climbed up the steps and shook her hand, his grip maybe too strong. Back in London girls hugged him and did the pretence of a peck on the cheek. This formal gesture felt strange, yet more sincere.

They gazed at each other, both nervous and both maybe a little disappointed. Jack was a shade shorter than she had imagined; she plainer than he expected.

Yet even in that first clumsy moment, it felt like a great old door, under-used and stiff with age, was slowly opening.

I saw a white horse
he wanted to say, or even shout.

Instead he just stared at her in silence, his head thrust a little forward in that intense, disconcerting way of his, and she at him. Their initial disappointments were almost at once replaced by something else.

‘
What?
’ she said finally, curiosity in her voice.

‘You look different – taller than I expected.’

What he really wanted to say took him by surprise:
The clothes don’t matter, Katherine, because your eyes are beautiful and the way you hold yourself as well and . . . and . . . there’s something that makes me want to be sure that no one ever hurts you.

Katherine had her own thoughts too:
You look different, Jack. You look stronger and self-confident, like you know your place in life and aren’t afraid of it – that makes me a bit scared of you.

But neither one of them said any of this.

‘Come this way,’ she said, feeling she was inviting something powerful and unpredictable into the house. ‘Um . . . through here,’ she gestured.

The dark interior of the house loomed around him.

‘I saw a white horse,’ he muttered, following through the darkness this girl whose back and hips were now more like a woman’s.

‘Mum wants to say hello,’ said Katherine over her shoulder, not having heard what he said. He didn’t repeat it.

So they journeyed on together into the shadowy recesses of a house that had known illness too long and was ready for new life again.

‘Jack?’

She had stopped in the shadows by a door ajar. He could see it led to a conservatory.

‘Jack, Mum’s not her normal self . . . I mean . . . there’s something I didn’t tell you.’

He stared at her, saying nothing.

Close-to he could see her nervousness. Of him? Of the situation? He felt nervous too.

‘What?’

‘Mum talks strangely sometimes and . . . I mean she’s in a lot of pain. And there’s the drugs which affect her mind so she seems to see things. I mean . . .’

‘What do you mean?’

Jack felt he was more used to straight talking than she was. Where he came from if you weren’t clear what you wanted you didn’t get it. You had to say what you meant.

‘I thought you might not come if I told you she . . . has delusions. Sees things that aren’t there.’

‘What things?’

She took a deep breath.

‘Little people.’

‘Like dwarfs?’

‘No, not like dwarfs. Like . . . people. She might talk to you about them – maybe. She talks to Mrs Foale. Not to me though, not directly.’

‘It’s all right Katherine, I won’t be embarrassed. I’ve been ill too, the mind plays tricks. Did she really want me to come or did you make that up?’

‘Of course she did. I don’t make things up.’

He grinned, more relaxed than she was.

‘Let’s go and see her,’ he said, ‘and then I’ll make my own mind up.’

She looked relieved.

‘Right,’ she said, ‘here goes . . .’

J
ack had never been in the same room as a dying person before, and it shocked him. It felt as if something else was hovering there in the shadows whose name was Death.

Jack knew of the Grim Reaper from his computer games. In real life he seemed much more scary. He also found that, strictly speaking, Clare was not in a room at all, which added to the odd, disturbing quality of the situation.

Weeks before, when she had become too weak to make it upstairs to her bedroom anymore, they had, at her suggestion, brought her bed downstairs and put it into the conservatory.

It was overheated, the more so when the sun shone, but its humid air helped her breathing and she could keep the doors open without getting cold.

The conservatory was huge, crumbling and Victorian, its slanting glazed ceiling supported by rusting Gothic cast-iron pillars up which vines grew from the earthen floor itself, their roots cracking the tiles around them. It was stuffed with potted plants amongst which, near the two sagging doors that opened wide onto a ruined terrace, stood Clare’s bed.

Outside, growing up and across the glass panes of the conservatory, were the thick and still leafless stems of vines and wisteria, and an out-of-control rambling rose. In one corner the wisteria had broken through like the advance party of on invasion force. It felt almost as if the garden was trying to reclaim the house.

The garden itself stretched away outside in all directions, and from where Jack stood it appeared to have no boundaries or any end to it. There was a rough lawn, bumpy and badly mown, with a few formal and once elegant flowerbeds now gone to seed and weed. At a distance of a hundred yards, the ‘lawn’ gave way to shrubs and trees dominated nearest the house by two enormous conifers whose thick straight trunks rose nearly black against the cloudy sky.

They looked like two dark sentinels standing guard at the entrance to a world beyond; or maybe standing guard over Clare Shore against the world outside.

Or both.

Between them Jack could see that the ground beyond was a patch of rough grass around which other trees seemed to be closing in.

Jack hardly recognized Clare lying there among the untidy sheets and blankets and the many pillows scattered on her bed. The last time he had seen her was when he was only eight, and she could still travel. She had then visited him in hospital in London, pushed in a wheelchair by Mrs Foale, who had not yet made an appearance.