The Boy in the Field Read online

  During the long summers when he was becoming a teenager, Matthew had read scores of detective novels. Along with many TV programs, they had given him an image of this tribe of men who drank too much, shaved too little, were oddly erudite, seldom happily married, and in general behaved more like the villains they were trying to catch than the citizens they were trying to protect. Often they had some arcane hobby: growing roses, listening to opera. At first sight Hugh Price contradicted most of these notions. He wore a wedding ring, and even at eight in the evening his fair skin was smoothly shaved. His triangular face—like a Siamese cat’s, Duncan said later—balanced on a long, elegant neck. He offered Matthew his hand, and introduced himself and PC Hannah Jones. Beneath her hat, her hair was wavy, and her eyebrows swooped like dark wings. She was, Matthew judged, only a few years older than him.

  As he gave his full name and age, he felt his palms grow slippery. I’m not guilty, he thought indignantly, but his body had its own ideas. “How is he?” he said.

  The detective said the boy had recovered consciousness. “The doctors expect him to make a full recovery. Can you tell me, in your own words, what happened this afternoon?”

  Briefly Matthew pictured other people’s words hanging in the air: laundry on a washing line. He could borrow one person’s pajamas, another’s T-shirt. He explained about their father not showing up at the school, how they had started to walk home.

  The detective paused in his rearranging of the miniature columns in Zoe’s set. “You don’t usually walk?”

  “No. It’s nearly five miles. We take the bus. Sometimes we cycle.”

  “Did you see anything lying by the side of the road? Pass any cars? Or cyclists? Other people walking?”

  A number of cars had passed, one cyclist that he recalled, a man in sleek shorts, pedaling hard, but no other pedestrians. They had been discussing what to give their mother for her birthday. Zoe wanted to get her a necklace; Duncan had seen a print he liked in an antique shop. The afternoon had been entirely ordinary until Zoe spotted something through the hedge, and he and Duncan followed her into the field.

  “Was the gate open? Were there any marks on it? Anything unusual?”

  Matthew yearned to be helpful, but all he remembered was the surprising newness of the gate. He shook his head, no.

  “And did you recognize the boy?”

  “Duncan, my brother, thought he’d seen him before but he couldn’t remember where. Do you know who he is?”

  “His name is Karel Lustig. He works nights at the Cottage Hospital.” The detective let the name occupy the room before he asked his next question. “When you saw him, did anything strike you?”

  “He looked very peaceful. We thought he was asleep.”

  They had, but only for a few seconds. The boy had lain so still. The detective remarked his hesitation and he admitted that what the boy really reminded him of was a statue at Dorchester Abbey: John de Stonor, lying on his tomb, his marble clothing neatly arranged for eternity. Sitting next to the detective, the constable made a note. Had Matthew finally said something of interest, or had she just remembered that she needed to buy eggs?

  “Did you touch him?”

  Matthew shook his head again; he had wanted to. “Zoe did.”

  “And did he speak?”

  “Once. He said ‘Coward.’ ”

  Through the open window a sudden breeze caught the overhead light; their three shadows swayed back and forth across the piano. Matthew imagined their house, all the houses in the street, in the town, empty of people, like the ruined mansion they had come across in Wales last summer, the rooms decorated with flowery wallpaper, ivy creeping through the windows.

  When their shadows quieted, the detective said, “So, were there any signs, besides his injuries, that another person had been there? That there’d been a fight?”

  He recalled the boy’s hands lying on the grass, empty. He himself often went out with only the contents of his pockets, but when he was going to school, or to his job at the Co-op, he always had a backpack. “He didn’t have anything with him,” he said. “Maybe that was a sign of another person?”

  The detective was nodding. According to a nurse at the Cottage Hospital, Karel had been carrying a backpack when he left work and discovered that his bicycle had a flat tire. “Whoever picked him up was probably the same person who attacked him and took his bag. We’ll know more when he’s conscious.”

  Matthew heard the “probably.” “Are you saying someone found him before us, stole his bag, and left him there?” In books and films, the villain nearly always turned out to be not the obvious person.

  “No, but it’s important not to take anything for granted. Do you fence?” The detective nodded at the mask on top of the piano.

  “I’m taking lessons.”

  “Épée or foil?”

  “Foil, so far.”

  “If you remember anything else, no matter how small, please get in touch. Don’t worry about bothering me, or seeming stupid.” He held out a business card, the first Matthew had ever been offered. Then, tilting his triangular face, the detective said, “You did a good thing today. You saved a boy’s life.”

  While Matthew talked to the detective, his father, back at the kitchen table, helped himself to more fish pie—it had turned out well—and described his latest commission, a wrought-iron garden gate. He had persuaded the customer to let him use William Morris’s willow pattern.

  “Nice,” said Duncan. “Lots of little leaves.”

  Shut up, shut up, Zoe thought. Why was the detective taking so long? What could Matthew possibly have to say? Her impatience shredded the air. She pulled the elastic band off her ponytail, shook out her hair. When Duncan stood to clear the plates, she stayed in her chair. She could do nothing but wait.

  At last Matthew returned. As she stepped into the parlor, she felt her shoulders relax, her heartbeat slow. This man would explain what had happened; he would make sense of the boy’s scarlet legs. He introduced himself and asked her full name and age. While the policewoman wrote down her answers, he absentmindedly plucked Cleopatra’s barge from the blue ribbon of the Nile that ran across the back of the set, behind the Forum.

  “Could you tell me about this afternoon?” he said.

  She gave her account, trying to be as precise as possible, and asked if the boy was going to be all right. The detective said he would be fine in a few weeks. Without prompting, he told her the boy’s name—pleasingly distinct—and occupation.

  “But why would anyone hurt him?” she said. “Are there really people who drive around at seven a.m., waiting to stab hospital orderlies?”

  He cradled Cleopatra’s barge; in his long fingers, it looked like a large canoe. “Perhaps they had an argument? Your brother said you touched him.”

  Was he accusing her? She couldn’t tell. “I wanted him to know he wasn’t alone. I didn’t hurt him.”

  “I’m sure he appreciated that. Did he say anything while you were with him?”

  “He said ‘Cowrie.’ Like the little shells the Vikings used as money.” On her desk she had an eggcup half full of the ones she’d collected on the beach in Wales.

  “ ‘Cowrie,’ you’re sure?”

  Zoe said she was—maybe he was dreaming? Both the detective and the police constable wrote in their notebooks. “Please phone,” he said, “if you remember anything else.”

  She slipped his card into her pocket. “Do you mind putting my barge back?”

  That night Duncan turned off the lights in his room and stood at the window, staring down into the shadowy garden. Their house was in the middle of a terrace, the garden separated from those of their neighbors by brick walls. Beyond the lawn and the picnic table was a pergola covered with roses and honeysuckle, and beyond that a bed of rhododendrons, azaleas, smoke bushes, and two laburnum trees. The breeze that had sprung up earlier had grown stronger, and the trees and shrubs were swaying. The boy’s one word—“Cowslip”—had made him think of the
little mermaid and her sisters, tending their gardens beneath the turquoise sea. When he was younger, eight or nine, he had read the story over and over, picturing the garden filled with cornflowers and cowslips, willing the prince to recognize the little mermaid. Now, as he stood watching, a person stepped forward beneath the laburnum trees.

  My first mother, he thought. She’s come for me.

  For years he had seldom spoken of his birth mother, rarely thought of her, but not for a second did he doubt his vision. She was summoning him, warning him. Even as he pressed his face to the glass, the dark form faded, thinned, became another shadow among shadows.

  Everyone else was in bed. Walking as quietly as possible, he went downstairs and made his way from room to room. He had always liked windows—the eyes of a house, giving and receiving light—but as he checked each lock, they seemed stupidly fragile. One stone, and anyone could climb in. Once again he missed Arthur, who had announced each visitor with a single low bark.

  Back in his room, he wedged a chair under the doorknob like people did in films. Still he did not turn on the light, which would betray his presence, or the radio. Lying in bed, he felt guilt creeping up his arms. He was leaving his parents and siblings undefended. Worse than that. He was hoping that any intruder would be waylaid by more tempting choices. When the guilt reached his shoulders, he got out of bed and moved the chair back to his desk.

  Two

  Matthew

  His first waking thought was that yesterday he had encountered something extraordinary: a crime like the ones he read about in books, with a victim and a villain. Gazing at his bedroom window, the curtains fringed with light, he was filled with elation. But as he got up, washed, and dressed in the predictable school uniform, the feeling ebbed. Today, he could already tell, was going to be what he and Benjamin called the SOS: same old shit. Downstairs he found Duncan at the table, yawning over his cornflakes, and their mother at the counter, making her lunch.

  Zoe was hovering beside the toaster. “Please can we have the day off?” she begged. “You could say we were in an accident.”

  He was about to object—he had spent hours preparing for the debate in history, and he needed to see Rachel—but their mother was already saying she didn’t think half an hour in a field justified their absence. “Don’t forget your running shoes,” she added.

  He waited to see how Zoe would respond. Often his sister treated argument as a sport, persisting long after the outcome was settled. Now he watched her watch their mother, as she deftly wrapped her sandwich, and decide not to press her case.

  On the bus they each usually sat with friends. Today he slid into the seat beside Zoe; Duncan took the seat in front. Opening his history book, he tried to focus on Archduke Ferdinand and the numerous and confusing causes of World War I. Duncan and Zoe got out their own books. Last night, before he left, the detective had asked them not to talk about the boy in the field. “You walked home from school and did your homework,” he had said. “End of story.” As the bus neared the school, Zoe reminded them of their promise.

  “Who would I talk to?” Duncan said.

  It was not, Matthew knew, a rhetorical question. His brother was genuinely curious: Who, among his friends, did Zoe consider a suitable confidant?

  “Just don’t,” she said. Although she was the one who would find it hard not to chatter to Moira and Frances and Gita.

  Inside the school they had no choice but to separate. As he got out his French textbook, the girl at the next desk asked if he’d heard. A boy had been attacked in a field and nearly died. “Didn’t you walk home yesterday?” she said.

  He was simultaneously nodding and shaking his head when Mademoiselle Fournier came to the rescue. “Bonjour, mes élèves. Comment ça va?”

  As he went from class to class, he heard different versions of the story: a boy had been assaulted, murdered, robbed at gunpoint, sometimes two boys. By the time he saw Rachel at lunchtime, he was able to feign ordinary curiosity. She repeated the gun story, and he said he had heard that too. Only Benjamin didn’t mention the boy; he had had an idea for their next event. For the last year the two of them had been staging odd happenings: an anarchic egg-and-spoon race at sports day; a stall outside the gym selling artisanal paper clips; an imaginary country inserted on the map in the geography classroom. Six weeks had passed before anyone noticed Wallenia, complete with mountains, lakes, and a capital city, overlapping Bulgaria and Romania.

  Now Benjamin suggested a millennium display. “We could have all kinds of machines failing,” he said. “Pencil sharpeners, lawn mowers, eggbeaters, alarm clocks.”

  “Toasters,” Matthew volunteered, “hair dryers, staplers.”

  Was a stall at school the best idea? Or maybe in town, outside the Co-op? It was a relief, as they traded ideas, not to think about the boy for ten minutes.

  That afternoon Duncan had a piano lesson, and Zoe was at cross-country; he sat alone near the front of the bus. The temperature had fallen, and the sky tumbled with the gray clouds that his father called cumulonimbus capillatus. Soon the swallows would gather on the telegraph wires, getting ready for their long flight south. When he’d told Zoe about Wallenia, she had said, “But what’s the point, if no one notices?” That, he had tried to explain, was exactly the point.

  He got off at the stop beside the Co-op. Through the plate glass window, he could see Eileen and Bob on the tills, ringing up customers. He waved, and Bob waved back. At the first corner he turned not toward home but in the direction of his father’s forge, a few streets away. The double doors facing onto the forecourt were closed, which meant no more customers were expected that day. He let himself in by the side door. The forge had been in the family for over a hundred years, and no one, not even his father, knew the exact contents of the building. There were horseshoes from when Queen Victoria was on the throne, account books kept in elegant copperplate, tools that should have been in a museum, lists of jobs and debts, faded calendars, single gloves, coils of wire, cigar boxes full of nails, old bellows, hammers, and vises of many sizes. This afternoon the fire was almost out, his father’s apprentice had gone home, and his father was standing at the workbench, sorting nails into a row of boxes. Matthew watched his hands moving back and forth. When he was younger, he had found his parents’ ability to concentrate bewildering. What did it mean that he disappeared so entirely from their brains? Now he envied them.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Matthew. I didn’t hear you come in. You’d make a good burglar.”

  “Have they caught the man?”

  “The man?” His father reached for a handful of nails. “Oh, you mean whoever attacked that boy. How would I know? I’ve been here all day, working on my willow gate.” He dropped three nails into three different compartments—each landed with a different clink—and glanced over at Matthew. “Don’t worry,” he said. “He won’t attack anyone else.”

  All day thoughts about the boy and his assailant had been sliding in and out of Matthew’s brain, but that the man might seek another victim had not been among them. Now his father saying he wouldn’t at once raised the specter that he would. He imagined the man lying in wait in some doorway, or behind a tree. His father was still talking. Zoe was the one he worried about. She was impulsive, overly confident. And she could easily pass for older. “You’ve got to keep an eye on her,” he urged, “especially when she doesn’t want you to.”

  Two summers ago, when they were camping in Normandy, Zoe had failed to return from buying baguettes. They had searched the campsite, the town. Just as their mother was about to call the police, she had reappeared. The guide from the local museum, whom they’d befriended the day before, had been at the boulangerie; he had taken her to see a World War II bunker. “It had these tiny windows for guns,” she said. “And a hole in the ceiling for a periscope.”

  “Promise you won’t go off with a stranger again,” their mother had said. “Anything could have happened.”

  Zoe had promised b
ut, watching her face, Matthew could tell she didn’t understand the force of “anything.” Only in the last few months, as he and Rachel spent more and more time beneath her duvet, had he sensed that his sister too, with the help of first Luke, then Ant, was learning this new language.

  “Dad, she never listens to me. Besides, you said he wouldn’t attack anyone else.”

  “Well, do your best,” said his father. “I’ll be home soon. Betsy’s at her class until eight.”

  His mother’s class in ancient Greek was a new addition to the family timetable. In August she had announced that she’d always wanted to read The Odyssey in the original. Now twice a week she came home late, and at weekends she did homework at the kitchen table, frowning over the unfamiliar alphabet.

  The lattice of streets between the forge and their house was so familiar that often Matthew walked the entire distance noticing nothing. Today he silently interrogated the houses and privet hedges, the cars and cats and rowan trees. Do you know Karel? Do you know who hurt him? And then, as he passed the plaque marking the site of the old glove makers’ factory, he was thinking not about Karel but about Claire. She had joined his class halfway through primary six, and their teacher had asked him to show her round. She was older than him, almost eleven, and wanted to go to Iceland where there were volcanoes and wild ponies.

  One day she had invited him home for tea. They had played Monopoly with her little sisters, who were too young to follow the rules but liked shaking the dice. Claire was negotiating for Pall Mall when a car pulled up in the street. The next thing he knew, she was folding the Monopoly board into the box, telling her sisters to be quiet and Matthew to do his homework. “What’s all the fuss?” he had said. Then her father came into the room.

  All he could think was: I have to get out of here.

  “But did he do something?” his mother asked when he tried to explain.