The Boy in the Field Read online

  “This is Frank Lustig,” his father said. “Frank, my younger son, Duncan.”

  He was so used to the hastily concealed double take most people did on meeting him—his dark skin, his dark eyes—that he barely noticed it, but he did notice Frank’s lack of hesitation as he set aside the dahlias and offered his hand. Did Karel’s eyes have the same dark rim and flaring blue iris?

  “Thank you for finding my younger son.”

  His voice was different, Duncan thought, each word bitten off, precisely. “Zoe, my sister, was the one who saw something through the hedge.”

  “And I want to thank her too. I am here on behalf of myself and my wife and, of course, Karel. I hope you will understand that he cannot come himself. He sends his gratitude.” As he spoke, an earwig skittered out of a dahlia and came to a stop, tiny horns motionless, on the edge of the table. Another followed. Neither Frank nor his father noticed.

  While his father made mugs of tea, Frank explained that he had grown up in a small town near Prague and moved to England eight years before with the help of his wife’s family; two of her uncles had come to England in the 1930s. He ran a small building company with his cousin. Duncan offered his finger to the earwig. The earwig refused.

  “Does Karel remember what happened?” his father asked.

  “Yes, but we are not allowed to talk about it.” At the hospital, Frank said, Karel had been about to tell them when his brother came into the room. “Karel started screaming. We didn’t know he and Tomas had quarreled. Later he talked to the police, but to us, silence. Now he’s home, there is this huge thing that none of us mentions.”

  He means the elephant in the room, Duncan thought.

  “But he gave a description of the man?” his father said.

  Frank nodded. “A police artist came to the hospital. Karel told him eyes like this, ears like that.”

  Duncan filed the information away to examine later: the police used artists.

  Every night, Frank went on, Karel made him check the windows and doors. Ten minutes later, he checked them himself. “I’ve never hit another person in my life,” Frank said, “but when we find this man, who made my son afraid, I will do my best to knock him down.”

  Duncan remembered that night when he had gone from window to window. He wanted to ask, Was Karel different in other ways too? Did he like different things to eat? How did he feel about the color red? About grass? Did he have bad dreams? Did he remember the bales? The swallows? Had he ever read The Little Mermaid? But his father was offering chocolate biscuits and saying he’d made a banister for a house Frank had built. While they talked about work, Duncan captured the first earwig under a glass and carried it outside. Bravely it darted away between towering blades of grass. Back inside, the second earwig was nowhere to be seen.

  At supper Matthew was still out. Duncan watched Zoe’s plump lower lip push forward as his father described Frank’s visit. When he finished, she said, “May I be excused,” and without waiting for a response stood up, carried her plate over to the dishwasher, and left the room. His parents exchanged a glance.

  “My Greek class is going on a tour of the Ashmolean on Saturday,” said his mother. “Would you like to come?”

  “Yes, please.” He was already planning to visit his favorite statues in the museum.

  His father focused on his carrots and said he had to do an estimate for a pergola.

  After supper, Duncan stopped outside Zoe’s room. She had found the boy; Frank should have spoken to her, but no one was to blame. Before he could knock, she called out “Go away.” He went to his room, wrote a note—You are not an accident—and, trusting her to understand, slid it under the door. One day, when the three of them were arguing, Zoe had said, “At least you know Mum and Dad chose you. Matthew and I are just accidents.” Both Matthew and he had disagreed. Matthew said accidents mostly happened to unmarried people. He had said that if anyone was an accident, it was him. His parents didn’t have a clue who they were choosing.

  As he lay in bed, he could feel Zoe’s dark mood swirling through the house. Perhaps that was why, when he finally slept, he had a vivid dream. He was downstairs, walking from room to room. Everything was the same, the sitting room, the parlor, but then, as he left the kitchen, there on his left was a door he had never seen before. He opened it and stepped into a beautiful, high-ceilinged room, filled with pearly light. The furnishings were simple: a long wooden table with chairs. On the walls hung several pictures, reproductions of paintings he loved. He sat down at the table. A heavy sheet of paper was waiting for him, and four perfectly sharpened pencils. Nearby sat a woman. He could not quite make out her features, but her skin was dark, like his; she too was waiting for him.

  A cat, wailing in the garden, woke him. From the dark rectangle of his window he guessed that it was very early morning. He went downstairs and made his way from room to room, turning on lights, opening all the doors, even the cupboards. But none led to the beautiful room. Back in bed, he tried to reenter it through the only available doorway: sleep.

  Seven

  Zoe

  As she laid her bike down on the grass, two rabbits darted for the safety of the hedge, white tails flicking. The bales were gone; the stubble, beneath windy skies, was a dull brown. Perhaps Karel, in his blue shirt and black shorts, had paused here, experiencing his first twinge of doubt. Most of the time, Zoe thought, we behave as if everyone is going to follow the rules. If a man appeared here now, say the man from the churchyard, what could she do but run? Or submit.

  She spread out her poncho and sat down in the lee of the hedge, a few yards from where Karel had lain. She had never told anyone, not even Duncan, to whom she told most things, about these moments when she left her body. Even the word “moment” was wrong. She slipped between the teeth of time. She could still conjure what she recalled as the first occasion. She was sitting on the beach, looking at the waves, holding a piece of seaweed in one hand, a whelk in the other. Her parents thought she was sitting quietly for once, but she was hovering nearby. She could smell the salt air, see the waves glinting and the sand with its Morse code of seaweed and shells, feel the sunlight but she was no longer tethered to a single source of sensation. Then she was back again. The whelk had left an oval mark on her palm.

  She couldn’t make it happen. Sometimes it didn’t for months, and she worried she had lost the knack. Then she would leave again. Now she waited, hoping to catch some reverberation, however faint: an aftershock. Nothing. A rabbit. Nothing. After fifteen minutes she was bored, and cold, and entirely sure that she was not leaving her body today. Walking back to the gate, she saw a pale-green crayon lying in the grass.

  Duncan was in the kitchen, eating toast glistening with plum jam, reading a book.

  “You left this in the field,” she said.

  “Thanks.” He set the crayon beside his plate.

  “What were you doing there?” She wanted to be angry—why had he gone without telling her?—but as usual he had disarmed her.

  “I just wanted to see it again.” He held out half the toast, and she took a bite.

  “Me too. It’s weird that the police haven’t found the man.”

  “Not really. They never figured out who broke the window in the school cloakroom, and that’s in the middle of town.”

  “I thought being there I might”—she eyed the crayon—“sense something.”

  Duncan took a last bite and ran his finger round the rim of the plate. “Maybe too many things have happened in the field,” he said. “Like this house. Think of all the people who lived here before us, and some of them must have died here, like Granny. Sometimes I think I hear her talking, but I can’t make out the words. Do you ever hear her?”

  “No.” But as she went to make more toast, she recalled how once or twice, as she drifted into sleep, she had caught stray words and phrases wafting by. “Now you’ve told me,” she said, “I’ll listen harder.”

  The next time she went to Oxford, she loo
ked not at shop windows but at men, those alone and those with women; in some ways it was easier when they were with women. Had one of them lured Karel into the field? Her eyes flicked over a man close to her father’s age, a boy around Matthew’s. Neither looked like a bad person, but what did a bad person look like? Her father’s last apprentice, Freddy, had a nicely freckled face and whistled while he worked. But one day the police had arrived at the forge; Freddy had been borrowing her father’s tools to steal scrap metal.

  After an hour of circling the streets, she took refuge in the Covered Market. She bought a cup of hot chocolate and lingered near the stall to drink it. The man who’d been behind her in the queue stood a few yards away. He kept glancing over. She pretended not to notice while taking in his five o’clock shadow, his dark hair skimming the collar of his faded denim jacket. He was twenty. Maybe even twenty-five. When she left, he followed. She made it easy for him, stopping to look in the shop windows she had previously ignored, waiting for his reflection to join hers before she moved on. In front of a shoe shop, he finally spoke.

  “You’re a hot little thing, aren’t you?” he said hoarsely.

  Close up, in full daylight, she saw that his eyes were bloodshot, his nails arced with dirt, his clothes not faded but soiled. She ducked into the shop and tried on pairs of boots until it was time for the bus. Back in the street, she looked neither to right nor left but ran all the way to the station. Only as she was queuing to board the bus did she dare to glance around. Her gaze fell on another man: fair hair, slightly haggard, standing nearby. His gaze, quick, unsmiling, met hers.

  Eight

  Matthew

  “Will you make us a sign?” he said. “We’ll pay you the going rate.”

  He had been pleased when the idea came to him. Duncan would feel appreciated, and the result would be much better than anything he or Benjamin could do. They were setting up a table outside the Co-op on Friday afternoon: Are you prepared for 2000? Have you checked your lawnmower?

  “Tell me what you want to say,” Duncan said. “Would you like pictures as well?” He was standing at his noticeboard, rearranging various postcards. His room, as always, was the neatest in the house.

  “Pictures would be great. Maybe some of the appliances we’re demonstrating?”

  “Are things really going to fall apart on New Year’s Eve?”

  “No, it’s a joke. Computers may go haywire, but staplers won’t. Can I see your new drawings?”

  Duncan straightened one last card and pulled out his large sketchbook. Setting it on the desk, he began to turn the pages. Here was his friend Will, his teacher Ms. Humphreys, the neighbor’s cat, their father’s workbench. He turned the page, and there was the boy, lying in the field. Matthew heard his own sharp intake of breath. Beside him, he felt Duncan waiting for his reaction. He leaned closer, examining the boy’s quiet face, his bare bloody legs. The next page showed him from a distance, a small, prone figure with a bale in the background. Yes, Matthew thought, he did look peaceful. He was torn between wanting to study each drawing and wanting to turn to the next.

  “I remembered where I saw him before,” Duncan said. “Last spring I was waiting at the bus stop when he went by on his bike. He waved. I think he mistook me for someone else, but it made me feel better about things.”

  By “things,” Matthew assumed Duncan meant how seldom he could answer the teachers’ questions. While Matthew was usually in the top three in his class, and Zoe did well in subjects that interested her, his brother came twelfth, or fifteenth, except in art, but not because he was stupid. He had an amazing memory, and once he understood something—Euclidean geometry, how to parse a sentence, the way hydrogen and oxygen bonded, why the repeal of the Corn Laws mattered—he remembered it precisely. “I’m following,” he had explained to Matthew, “but then the teacher says electrons orbit each other, and suddenly I’m picturing them instead of listening.”

  Matthew bent to examine a drawing of Karel’s head, each eyelash distinct, each link in the silver chain vivid. “This is exactly how I remember him,” he said.

  Duncan walked over to the window seat. When he turned around, he was holding a long, straight knife with a wooden handle. Matthew recognized the carving knife that every month or two his mother or father wielded over a roast, and every five or six months his father took to the forge to sharpen.

  “Last night,” Duncan explained, “I stabbed my mattress, to see if I could.”

  Matthew had the same lurching feeling he’d had when Zoe asked if the man would have picked her up. “You’re crazy,” he said. Then, “So could you?”

  “Sort of. People are always telling you to be careful of knives, as if they had a will of their own, but it’s surprisingly hard to stab something. You’ve got to do it all at once, really wanting to.” He held out the knife. “Have a go.”

  Matthew looked at his brother’s smooth bed, his desk with the sketchpads and boxes of crayons, his easel standing near the window: everything orderly and harmonious. “Stabbing a mattress isn’t the same as stabbing a person,” he said. “If I could pull a lever that hurt someone far away, I’m pretty sure I could do that. But if I could see the person, then I know I couldn’t.” Although if the person was Claire’s father, maybe he could.

  “Do you remember when we went swimming with Grandpa, and he showed us his scar?”

  Matthew nodded. “His bayonet wound. What is a bayonet anyway?”

  “It’s a blade you fasten on the end of your rifle so you can stab people who are too close to shoot. Did Grandpa ever say what happened to the German?”

  “No.” He had never thought about the German. “He probably killed him, but he wouldn’t tell us that.”

  “Remember how the scar had a little lip, like a mouth?” Duncan ran his finger caressingly down the blue sheen of the blade.

  And with that phrase, “a little lip,” Matthew could see his grandfather wading across the swimming pool, the puckered purple scar visible above the waistband of his swimming trunks. “You should put that back in the kitchen,” he said, pointing to the knife. “Mum might need it.”

  “Mum won’t need it for ages,” Duncan said. “You just don’t want me to keep stabbing my mattress, like a mad person.” But he carried the knife away.

  That night when the house was quiet, Matthew padded downstairs and searched the kitchen drawers until he found the knife. In his room, he peeled back the sheets and tried to stab a corner of his mattress. He had been taking fencing lessons for two years, but lunging with a foil, at a masked opponent seven or eight feet away, was very different from the intimacy of a knife. The first few times his arm faltered; the blade barely pierced the mattress cover. He closed his eyes, counted to three, and plunged the blade into the springy innards.

  Nine

  Zoe

  When her mother announced that the detective was coming back to talk to them, her first thought was that they’d caught the man, but as soon as Hugh Price stepped into the kitchen, she knew they hadn’t. Her mother offered tea, which he refused, and said she’d be upstairs.

  “This shouldn’t take long,” he said. “Shall we sit down?”

  Her brothers chose their normal places at the table; she chose her mother’s, facing him.

  “I wanted to tell you what we’ve learned so far,” he said, “and to check whether you’ve remembered anything else.”

  Did it make sense, Zoe wondered, that they would remember more, not less, as the days passed?

  He began by repeating what he’d told them on his first visit. Karel had finished his shift at the hospital only to discover that his bike had a flat tire. Typically he went straight home, but that morning he was meeting someone in their town. He decided to hitch. A few dozen cars passed, then a car pulled over. The driver, a man in his thirties, wore a suit. He was on his way to a meeting in Chipping Norton and would be happy to drop Karel off.

  Glancing occasionally at his notes, the detective recounted their conversation. When Ka
rel volunteered that he worked nights at the hospital, the man said he used to work as a night watchman in London. From eight p.m. to eight a.m. he had been alone in a building meant for a hundred people. Every night he was convinced that the world had ended. When his shift finished, he would step into a deserted street. Karel was saying sometimes he felt that way when the man swore—the car was overheating—and swerved into a gateway. He got out to check the boot and reappeared, holding two empty lemonade bottles. Maybe there was a water trough in the field? The man remembered seeing cows there last year.

  Who remembers seeing cows? Zoe thought.

  “As they stepped into the field,” the detective went on, “some rabbits ran for cover. The man raised a bottle and pretended to shoot. Suddenly Karel was sure there was nothing wrong with the car. He wanted to bolt, but he hoped if he pretended all was well, it would be. The last thing he remembers is saying he’d go and flag down a car. We’re asking everyone to look out for a blue car, with two doors and a bent aerial.”

  “Did he say what kind of blue?” Duncan leaned forward, his elbows on the table.

  “Sky blue. Or maybe baby blue.”

  “There was a baby-blue car.”

  She recognized his meditative tone; he was seeing the car in his mind.

  “When? Where?” Hugh Price had been sharing his attention between the three of them. Now he focused entirely on Duncan.

  “When I went to get help. One of the cars that didn’t stop.”

  “Do you remember anything else about it?”