The Boy in the Field Read online

  “He said good evening and looked at me like I was a worm.”

  Next day, when Claire raised her hand in class, he had glimpsed a bracelet of bruises. “If I were you,” he had said at break, “I’d run away.”

  “Where to?” she said bitterly. “Iceland? Besides I can’t leave my sisters behind.”

  His mother said she would speak to the head teacher, but unless the father did something drastic, they couldn’t intervene. “You mean,” Matthew said, “he has to hurt Claire before we can stop him hurting her?” He had begun walking her home every afternoon, hoping to be invited in. If only her father would hit him, they could go to the police. But she always said goodbye at the end of the street. Then one Monday her desk was empty. The teacher announced that Claire’s family had moved to Bristol.

  He was almost at the house. There was the pillar box, and the cherry tree his mother watered in summer. Surely by now, he thought, Claire had taken his advice and fled. Inside the empty hall, he turned on the light, took out the detective’s card, and went over to the phone. A woman answered on the second ring, and then Hugh Price was saying, “Matthew. Did you remember something?”

  “No,” he said sheepishly. Of course the detective would think he’d called with information. “I was wondering if you’d caught whoever did it?”

  “Not yet. But we have a good description.”

  “So he’s out there, walking around?” He tried, and failed, to conceal his indignation.

  There was a ticking sound, as if the workings of the detective’s brain were suddenly audible. When he spoke again, he sounded tired. “He may have bolted, or gone to ground, but yes, chances are, he’s just going about his business.”

  After he replaced the receiver, Matthew studied the phone with its ten numbers, which could be combined into thousands, millions, of permutations. If the man had a phone, then one of those permutations would ring in his living room, or hall. He pictured himself dialing, and dialing, and dialing.

  Three

  Duncan

  During English, Ms. Humphreys gave them fifteen minutes to answer the questions she’d written on the board about The Merchant of Venice. Then she collected their notebooks and walked around at the front of the room, calling on different pupils. When she looked in his direction, he closed his eyes; she asked the girl in front. At the end of the lesson she gave him a little nod and came to sit at the next desk. In a low voice, quite different from the one she’d been using to address the class, she asked if he had read the play.

  He had.

  “Did you side with Shylock, or Antonio?”

  “Both. Shylock was cruel—the idea of cutting a pound of flesh is horrible—but Antonio treated him as if he had no feelings. And then Jessica steals from him and runs away.”

  “And what about the caskets?”

  “They were just a way for Portia’s father to control her, and make the suitors seem dumb. It had to be the lead casket.”

  “But you only answered two of the questions.” Ms. Humphreys held up his open notebook.

  Someone had drawn a seagull on a corner of the desk. Nearby was a rudimentary cat. Duncan saw how each could be made better. Following his gaze, Ms. Humphreys said, “Could you have drawn the answers?”

  “If I had enough time, if people didn’t keep interrupting. If . . .” How to explain that sometimes a drawing came right the first time. Sometimes it took a dozen attempts, and even then failed.

  “Do you know what a self-fulfilling prophecy is? If you keep doing badly on tests, you start expecting to do badly, and then you do even worse. You just need more time.”

  “So I’m not”—he retrieved an insult from last year—“a moron?”

  He saw Ms. Humphreys register the word, and the context in which he must have heard it. “No,” she said firmly. “You have a good brain, but you’re going to have to learn to stand up for yourself, to explain that some things take you longer. I know you’re passionate about painting, but you need words too.”

  On the bus home he saw Zoe sitting halfway back and went to join her. He was longing to tell her about Ms. Humphreys and his good brain, but she was folding and unfolding her shirt cuffs, a sure sign of fretfulness. “Do you remember,” she said as the bus pulled away from the school, “when the Sawyers’ dog attacked you?”

  How could he forget one of the worst events of his life that had led to one of the best? He and Zoe were playing in the Sawyers’ garden—their mother was having tea with Mrs. Sawyer—when the back door opened and a huge dog leaped across the lawn and, in a single motion, seized Duncan’s leg. The pain was blinding, deafening. From far away he heard Zoe yelling. Later she showed him the red tooth mark on her hand where the dog had briefly released him to snap at her. Then Mrs. Sawyer was standing over them, shouting, “Let go, Leo. Let go.”

  The day his stitches came out, his father had arrived home with a dachshund. “He’ll help you get over being afraid of dogs,” he had said, and Arthur, small, wise, the color of a newly hulled chestnut, with dark ears and a beautiful smile, had turned out to be the perfect ambassador for dogkind. He had carefully distributed his favors among the five of them, with a marked preference for Duncan.

  “So why didn’t you scream?” Zoe said now as the bus swayed around a corner.

  His trousers hid the crescent scar, but he could picture the seventeen tooth marks; the boy had had two red stockings, he had had one. “He was eating my leg,” he said. “All I could do was try to disappear.”

  “Did you hear anything? See anyone?”

  “You mean, besides you screaming and Leo growling? No, there was a kind of haze.”

  “Remember that TV program about people who nearly died and saw a bright light at the end of a tunnel, someone waiting to welcome them? Do you think Karel saw someone?”

  Duncan didn’t remember the program, but he did remember the boy’s pale eyelids. “No.”

  “Perhaps”—Zoe smoothed her cuffs—“he was waiting for the right person to wake him.”

  From the way she spoke, both halting and eager, he knew she wanted to be that person. He himself had felt no desire to wake Karel. Watching the vein pulsing in his temple, his chest rising and falling, he had sensed that the boy had made his way to a place of safety; to wake him would be to hurl him back into hardship. Before he could say any of this, Moira was standing over them. Would Zoe like to go to the cinema?

  The autumn Leo had tried to eat his leg was also the autumn his father’s mother had come to live with them. Every afternoon, when he got home from nursery, he would go to the sitting room to show Granny the paintings he had made that day, and she would reward him with one of her special cough sweets, a purple oval dusted in sugar. “Your pictures emanate,” she told him. He asked what that meant, and she said, “They reach out to people. They glow.” But one afternoon her armchair was empty. He had looked in the parlor, the kitchen, before he knocked on her bedroom door. As he opened it very quietly—he was doing something forbidden—he heard a strange noise. Still holding onto the doorknob, he had stood there, searching the wardrobe, the windows, the heavy curtains, the chest of drawers, until, at last, he understood that it was Granny, lying in bed, who was making the hoarse rattling sounds that filled the room.

  His mother had discovered him, kneeling beside her. Later, alone in his room, he had drawn her pointed nose and sunken cheeks, her closed eyes and open mouth. Normally he didn’t care who saw his drawings—they were his, and not his—but this one he hid.

  Four

  Zoe

  She was still going to school, still studying, joking around with Moira, doing her chores, but it was as if her hair had stopped growing. A change, invisible to most other people, had overtaken her. A few days after they found the boy, she was searching for a book about Florence Nightingale when she came across a poem she had written the previous spring about her grandfather. She had carried her notebook to the churchyard and, sitting beneath a yew tree, summoned her memories: his mustache
yellow with nicotine, his collection of fountain pens, the poems he recited when they went on walks, his interest in airplanes, his dislike of his given name, Horace. She reread her first line: When we first met, I was the unsteady one. According to family lore, Horry had taught her to walk, holding her hand as she tipsily crossed the lawn.

  She had been working on the third stanza when a man, a stranger, came through the gate on the far side of the churchyard. What she saw first was his panama hat, then his white shirt and jeans. He was carrying a book. She had a vivid sense of the picture she made, a girl sitting beneath a yew tree, writing a possibly immortal sonnet. Perhaps the man was a scholar, searching the churchyard for some historical figure. Or a visitor looking for his own grandfather. The hat made him look vaguely foreign.

  She was struggling with the lines about her grandfather returning to the battlefields of his youth, when she felt a kind of buzzing. The man was standing thirty feet away, between two gravestones, his eyes fixed not on her but on the yew tree, his arms motionless at his sides. She glanced at his face and then—he was willing it—glanced lower.

  Everything happened very quickly. She saw his jeans and something that was not his jeans. The man retreated behind a gravestone. His shoulders hunched—fastening his fly, she guessed—and he walked swiftly, not quite running, toward the gate.

  She tried to continue writing about her grandfather, barely twenty, trapped in a muddy foxhole, but after a few minutes she set aside her notebook and walked over to the gravestones. The man had left his book on top of the taller stone: A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now” was one of her grandfather’s favorite poems.

  “A flasher,” Moira had said when she told her. “He must have been thrilled, finding a nubile girl in the churchyard.”

  “But what was the point? He showed me his willy and ran away.”

  “The point was to shock somebody.”

  Not somebody, Zoe had thought: me. The man had come to the churchyard to read, or look for a grave, and then, at the sight of her, been unable to help himself, like Antony with Cleopatra, giving up an empire for a kiss. Now, looking at the poem, it ended midway through the tenth line, she thought maybe she could go back to it. Or write another poem, about the boy lying on the grass while the birds watched over him.

  Five

  Matthew

  He had worried he might not recognize the gate, one among many, but a loop of yellow police tape hung helpfully from the top bar. He wheeled his bike into the field and leaned it against the hedge. The bales were still there, mysteriously larger. The oak tree looked the same, dark and burly. No swallows today—had they already left?—but two magpies strutting across the stubble, tails jerking. On the grass near the gate lay a gray stick, abandoned by some hiker.

  He carried the stick over to where he remembered the boy lying and began to circle it. All day he had imagined finding something significant: a key, a pair of spectacles, a business card reading John Smith, Assailant. In the books he read, there were always clues. His father had told him the word “clue” came from the Anglo-Saxon for thread, and that was what he was looking for, a thread that would lead him from something small, something everyone else had overlooked, to another thing and another, each a step closer to finding the assailant. Scrutinizing the ground, he saw only grass, knobbly soil, straw, pebbles, rabbit droppings.

  The month before, on a picnic, his mother had lost her wedding ring. One moment the five of them were talking and laughing. The next they were crawling around, searching. Nothing. Nothing. Then Zoe had exclaimed “Here it is,” and they were all laughing again, the gap between disaster and happiness instantly closed. He picked a few blades of grass and slipped them into his shirt pocket. When he got home, he would write the date on an envelope and seal the grass inside. He pictured men in uniform on their hands and knees, with magnifying glasses and metal detectors. If there were anything to find, wouldn’t they have found it? To his left he saw a flash of black and white: the magpies taking flight. The air shifted, and the first drops of rain fell.

  Near the hedge he discovered an empty beer bottle, coated with mud, a crumpled page from a comic Zoe used to read, and the dull blue rectangle of a local bus ticket. The last he put in his pocket, beside the blades of grass. He was walking back to the gate, the soil already darkening with rain, when he remembered the stick. Turning to retrieve it, he caught a glint of silver. There, beside a tuft of grass, lay the boy’s silver chain. It must have fallen, unnoticed, as the paramedics carried him to the gate. When he picked it up, he saw that the chain held a medallion the size of a ten-pence coin: a man fording a river with a small haloed figure on his shoulder.

  At home he headed to Zoe’s room, eager to show the St. Christopher. She was at her desk, doing homework; Duncan was lying on her bed, drawing. “Hi,” they both said without looking up. One of Matthew’s earliest memories was of the day his parents had brought home a tiny being with silky hair and perfect hands. His new brother had gazed, waveringly, at some distant view. Then his brown eyes had found Matthew and settled on him with a look of deep attention. Now, watching Duncan’s pencil move across the page, he could not remember the last time his brother had visited his room. Had he been curt? Preoccupied? As he zigzagged through the clutter on Zoe’s floor, he vowed to make amends. He picked up the dictionary on the window seat, and sat down.

  Duncan’s pencil paused. “What does ‘raped’ mean?” he said.

  Christ, thought Matthew. How to explain? He opened the dictionary, searching for the Rs, but Zoe was already offering her definition.

  “One person,” she said, “usually a man, forces another person, usually a woman, to do it, but it’s not really doing it.”

  “You do it”—Duncan started to draw again—“but you don’t?”

  She walked over to the bed. “Give me your hand.”

  Matthew watched as she began to squeeze, at first gently, then more and more tightly until Duncan cried “Stop.”

  “Like that. Something that can be good becomes bad because only one person wants it. Do you think”—she twirled so that her hair flew around her shoulders—“the man would have stopped to give me a lift?”

  Last spring, when she and Matthew missed the bus, she had been the one to hold out her arm and smile at the invisible motorists rushing by. Barely a dozen cars passed before a woman pulled over. As she accelerated back onto the road, she had asked if their parents knew what they were doing. “Yes,” Zoe had said, so quickly that all Matthew could do was nod.

  “Zoe,” he said now, “you’re mad. Whoever did this was seriously messed up. He would have driven right past you.”

  “Because I’m not pretty enough? Old enough?”

  Looking at her bright top, her faded jeans, he recalled his father’s admonition. She had changed so much in the last year, and in the few days since they knelt in the field, she had changed again. Perhaps something had traveled from Karel’s arm into her outstretched hand. He knew of several boys at school who liked her. Would they stop liking the new Zoe? Or like her even more? He suspected the latter.

  “Because,” he said, getting to his feet, “no one would want to hurt you.” Somehow the moment to show the St. Christopher had passed.

  “Was there anything else you wanted to tell me?” the detective said. They were in his office in the police station on St. Aldate’s, the St. Christopher lying on the desk between them. As he spoke, the telephone rang. Matthew waited for him to answer, and after half a dozen rings, realized he wasn’t going to. No one had ever not answered a phone for him. Hugh Price was more like a TV detective than he had at first seemed. On the wall above his desk hung a black-and-white photograph of a row of cottages next to a snowy field. The ringing stopped.

  “How is Karel?” Matthew said.

  “He’s home from the hospital. He’s very grateful to the three of you.”

  “Did he describe the person who attacked him?”

  “Caucasian ma
n, brown hair, clean shaven, blue eyes, reddish cheeks, thirtyish, medium build, wearing a suit. West Country accent. Walk down any street in Oxford, at any time of day, and you’ll see ten men who fit that description. If he has no prior convictions, which is often the case with a crime of passion, we’re going to have to get lucky. Did you find anything else in the field?”

  Don’t you have any clues, Matthew wanted to say. “An empty beer bottle. And a bus ticket.”

  The latter was still in his pocket, and he handed it over. Hugh Price thanked him, and asked if they might take his fingerprints. In another room a woman rolled his thumbs and fingers one by one on a pad of ink and pressed them to a piece of paper, divided into ten rectangles.

  “If you were planning a life of crime,” the detective said, “I’m afraid this will make it harder.”

  Walking back to the bus station, Matthew counted nine men who fitted the description; on the bus were two more brown-haired, thirtyish, white men. None wore a suit. He sat down next to a girl in school uniform, a book open on her lap. As she read, she gently whisked the end of her braid back and forth across the page: stroking the words? keeping herself company? There were several girls at school who behaved like this, treating their hair as if it were a silent, always available pet. Rachel, happily, was not among them.

  Six

  Duncan

  He was at the piano, playing “Greensleeves,” when the doorbell rang. Zoe and Matthew were out with friends, his mother was walking with her hiking group. He paused, listening for his father’s footsteps, and hearing them, started to play again. A minute later came a rap on the door. “Duncan, can you come and say hello?”

  In the kitchen a man with beautiful golden eyebrows and fiercely blue eyes was standing beside the table. Crooked in one arm, he held a bunch of crimson dahlias. The color was so pure, Duncan wanted to steal a flower and press the petals onto a page. It reminded him of another painting of Zeus his art teacher had shown him, one in which the god was not a bull but a swan. He was embracing a woman, wrapping his wings around her, and beneath their radiantly white bodies, one feathered, one not, lay a cloth the color of the dahlias.