The Boy in the Field Read online

  Then Lily was walking toward her, her dark eyes doing something that was the opposite of Anthony’s. As clearly as if she had spoken, Zoe heard the words: He wasn’t worthy of you.

  Twelve

  Matthew

  “You and Benjamin know each other too well,” the fencing coach declared. He paired Benjamin with Cally, who was shorter but faster. Matthew he put with Leon, who was tall and long-armed but had been fencing for only a few months. At first it was easy. Matthew scored three hits in a row. Then Leon scored a hit, and Matthew’s foil clattered to the floor. Stupid, he thought as he bent to retrieve it.

  “Sorry,” said Leon even as the coach was calling, “Well done.”

  Matthew adjusted his grip, and raised his foil. “Engage.”

  He lunged. Leon, foil wavering, parried. As they advanced and retreated across the room, Matthew began to understand that it was Leon’s very lack of grace, his awkward footwork, his faltering lunges that made it hard to anticipate his next move. He feinted for the chest and hit the shoulder. Or vice versa. Again and again Matthew was sure he was about to score, only to find his foil blocked

  “It was weird,” he told Rachel that evening. “Our coach is always going on about posture and footwork, but Leon ignores all that. It was like we were really fighting.” They were sitting on the sofa in her living room, fully dressed, ready to spring apart at her mother’s return.

  “I thought fencing was fighting,” she said.

  In the V of her blue sweater was the locket he’d given her for her birthday. Sliding his hand toward it, he explained that fencing wasn’t just about hitting your opponent. “There are rules, like in tennis or cricket. You have to aim for the torso. You have to take turns.”

  “But, Matty”—she pulled away—“you have to know when to ignore the rules. That’s why Greenpeace launched the Rainbow Warrior. The governments were ignoring international agreements, killing whales.”

  Before he could ask was it really the governments, they both heard a key in the lock.

  He was filling the dairy section, a container of milk in each hand, when a voice said “Excuse me.” A man, a boy, Matthew couldn’t decide which, was standing a few feet away. He looked familiar, but after nearly two years of working at the Co-op, that was true of many people.

  “Excuse me,” he said again—he had a faint accent—“are you Matthew Lang?”

  “Are you Tomas Lustig?”

  Three days in a row he had set his alarm, hoping to catch the milkman, and on the third day encountered not the young man he’d glimpsed last month but a middle-aged stranger. Tomas was working a different route, the new milkman explained. He promised to let him know that Matthew Lang wanted to talk to him. “I work at the Co-op on Saturdays,” Matthew had said.

  Now, as he unthinkingly placed the milk on the shelf, he studied his visitor. Tomas off-duty looked strangely different. Perhaps it was his faded brown trousers with pockets halfway down the thighs, or his watchman’s hat pulled so low that it squeezed his eyebrows closer to his blue eyes.

  “Yes,” said Tomas. “Why did—”

  His question was lost as Mr. Stoughton, a regular customer, tapped his way over. “Matthew, how are the university applications going? I’d like some mature cheddar.”

  While Matthew offered the red, the white, the extra mature, and asked after Mr. Stoughton’s dog, Tomas radiated impatience. As soon as Mr. Stoughton moved on to the cold meats, he said, “Why did you want to talk to me?”

  “We found your brother in the field. I was wondering how he’s doing? Have they caught the man?”

  Tomas’s eyebrows came even closer to his eyes, but already another customer was approaching the dairy case. “The Green Man at six,” he said, and headed for the exit.

  For the remainder of his shift, as he restocked shelves and assisted customers and worked on the till and mopped the floor, Matthew thought about what he would ask Tomas. Perhaps, even without knowing it, Tomas held the clue to Karel’s assailant. If only he could think of the right questions. When he stepped into the Green Man, the pub was just getting busy, people meeting each other after work, stopping for a pint on their way home. Tomas was already seated at a window table. As he waited to order a half of lager, Matthew studied him, unobserved. Even without his cap, he bore little resemblance to the boy in the field—his nose was broader, his eyes more deep-set—but what really distinguished him was the black cloud that hovered around him. Like Claire’s father, Matthew thought.

  He was still several yards from the table when Tomas caught sight of him and began to speak. “Was he in pain when you found him?”

  Matthew set his lager on the table and sat down. He repeated what he’d told the detective: Karel had seemed peaceful.

  “That’s good. Very good.” Tomas gave a soft whistle. “He looked peaceful at the hospital, until he saw me. Then he started screaming. Papa said it was the shock, that he was confused. Tomorrow he would remember I was his brother. But tomorrow made no difference.”

  He described how he’d bought some cheese scones, Karel’s favorite, and waited until his parents left for work before letting himself into the house. “I called out, ‘It’s me, Tomas.’ When I went into the sitting room, he was standing behind the sofa, holding an ashtray. I said his name. I held out the scones. He didn’t speak, just raised the ashtray. I can’t say it was the worst day of my life. That was the day he was hurt. But it was the second worst. He treats me as if I’ve done something terrible. Other people do too. Last week my fiancée said she didn’t want to see me again.”

  What was surprising, Matthew thought, was that he had a fiancée in the first place. “Did Karel—” he started to ask, but Tomas broke in. “We have to find the man who hurt him. Then he will remember I’m his brother.”

  A cheer rose from the dartboard on the other side of the room. A girl had scored a bull’s-eye, and her friends were applauding. Watching the jolly crowd, Matthew wondered why he was marooned on this island of unhappiness. Tomas knew no more than him, had no access to Karel. He edged his chair back from the table. “The police—” he began, but again Tomas interrupted.

  “No,” he said furiously. “They’ve moved on. But the man who hurt my brother is nearby. If he thinks he’s safe, he’ll let his guard down.” He was frowning not only with his forehead and his mouth but with his entire face.

  “Are you looking for him?” Matthew said, edging back a few more inches. “Do you have any clues?”

  “I search all the time while I deliver milk. Now I plan to go street by street. I know the man looks a little like me. I know he has a blue car.”

  “Well.” Matthew was on his feet. “Good luck.”

  “Wait.” Tomas too was standing. “Why did you want to see me? Do you know something? These have been the worst weeks of my life. Karel won’t speak to me. Sylvie won’t speak to me. I say good morning, and my customers don’t answer.” He held out his empty hands. “I don’t understand why I’m being punished.”

  For your Tomas-ness, Matthew thought.

  But Tomas was still talking. “I was hoping,” he said, “you might help me.”

  Thirteen

  Zoe

  With its original gold lettering, MacLeod & Son, above the door and its black-and-white-tiled entrance, the butcher’s was one of the oldest shops in town. Zoe had not been inside for years, but save for the new display cases, it looked exactly as she remembered. She took a cautious breath. Despite the trays of chops and steaks, sausages and mince, the air smelled of nothing in particular. While the boy ahead of her bought a pound of sausages, she studied the scotch eggs, neatly coated in breadcrumbs.

  “Hello, Zoe. How are you?” Like her father, Mr. MacLeod played for the town cricket team; his garden was a highlight of Garden Day.

  “Hi. I saw your sign.” She pointed as if he might have forgotten the Help Wanted sign in the window.

  Mr. MacLeod stepped out from behind the counter—his apron was reassuringly white—and exp
lained that he needed someone to work from eight to two on Saturdays, to help customers, and to clean and stock the cases. But what about her studies? Her parents?

  “My brother has a job at the Co-op. They’ll be fine. Can I fill out an application?”

  He laughed. “I know who you are, Zoe Lang. Your gran used to work here. Why don’t we try a couple of Saturdays? Tell your dad I’ll see him at the Salon meeting on Thursday.”

  When she announced her job at supper, her mother’s fork came to a standstill. “Darling,” she said in her careful voice, “what about your exams?” Across the table, her father’s forehead furrowed.

  She marshaled her arguments: her birthday was in just over a fortnight; Matthew had started at the Co-op when he was sixteen; they were always saying she needed to learn to manage money. “And Mr. MacLeod said Granny used to work there,” she added.

  “But you don’t eat meat,” Matthew said. “Why would you want to work at a butcher’s?”

  “You don’t eat everything you sell at the Co-op.” Beneath the table Lily nudged her leg.

  “Zoe,” said her father, “last year you almost failed Latin. You need to focus on school.”

  Normally she would have protested: Who used Latin in ordinary life? She was good at the subjects that mattered. Now she only wanted them to agree. “I promise I’ll do my homework. It’s only six hours a week.” She gazed at her parents imploringly, in turn. Which of them would yield first?

  “Well,” said her mother, “let’s see how you manage for a week or two.”

  Before her father could disagree—he was still frowning—she passed on Mr. MacLeod’s message about the Salon meeting. It was Matthew who had proposed the old-fashioned name for the town’s annual fundraiser. Each year the committee picked a theme for the Salon and everyone paid to attend, either as audience or performers. Last year people had reenacted scenes from famous films. Matthew and Benjamin had chosen the diner scene from Five Easy Pieces. Their parents had played the hero and heroine in I Know Where I’m Going. Zoe and Duncan had applauded.

  After supper, as they did the washing-up, she suggested that the three of them make a pact not to lie for a week. She had been mulling the idea since Ant called her a liar. She expected Matthew to laugh, and say “Weird.” Instead he looked up from the frying pan he was scrubbing and asked, “What counts as a lie? Mum’s always talking about how easy it is to manipulate witnesses. If you ask how fast the car was going when it hit the wall, people say twenty miles per hour. If you ask how fast it was going when it smashed into the wall, they say forty-five.”

  “Those people don’t know they’re lying.” Duncan dried a spatula. “It’s more like they’re color-blind.”

  “I’m not asking you to testify in court.” She slid a plate into the dishwasher. “I’m suggesting we try not to tell deliberate lies.”

  “So”—Matthew rinsed the pan—“if Benjamin asks what I think of his new song, do I have to say I can’t stand it? Or can I say I like ‘Broken to the Bone’ better? Both are true, but the first is truer.”

  “Isn’t lying better than hurting Benjamin’s feelings?” Duncan said.

  They both looked at Zoe.

  “How can you call yourselves friends,” she said, “if you can’t tell each other the truth?” Even as she spoke, she remembered telling Moira she looked fantastic in her new skirt.

  By Monday evening Duncan had declared a ban on questions. “If you ask a question,” he said, “people ask one back. Then you’re stuck.”

  Their pact was hardest for him, she thought, because he was the most truthful. “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “It’s just something I need to prove to myself.”

  “I know that,” he said, “but it’s interesting. I can see why there are monks who never speak.”

  Zoe had already upset most of her friends when on Wednesday the biology teacher called her and Frances, who sat in the next desk, up to the front. With her fuchsia lipstick and sleek hair, Ms. Hailey was one of the few teachers it was easy to imagine having a life outside of school. “It’s not surprising you both got the right answers,” she said, looking from Zoe to Frances and back again, “but it seems very strange that you made the same mistakes.”

  “I wasn’t copying,” said Zoe. “May I be excused?”

  At lunchtime neither Frances nor her friends would speak to her. Even Moira didn’t understand. “You mean you told on Frances because of some stupid pact?”

  “I didn’t say anything about her.”

  By Thursday Matthew and Benjamin had argued about a point in fencing. Duncan had told Will that a TV program he liked was stupid. They agreed to abandon the pact.

  “I don’t believe anyone always tells the truth,” said Duncan. “It’s too hard.”

  The idea that everyone was lying some of the time made the world feel slippery and unsafe, but the experiment had worked. She knew now that Ant was wrong. She was just an ordinary liar, nothing special. Even Duncan had to make small adjustments in order not to be driven out of town.

  The next day she discovered one of her father’s adjustments. She was at the chemist’s, buying shampoo, when the cashier asked if she’d collect Hal’s photographs. She put the envelope in her bag and forgot about it until she came across it that evening. What impulse made her open it? The first photo was of a sunset over the sea; the second of a woman standing on the beach, laughing, her hair blowing in the wind, her jeans rolled up. The photographer’s shadow lay at her feet. Zoe recognized the beach—it was in Wales, near the cottage they sometimes borrowed from friends—and she recognized the woman. One afternoon last spring, when she and Moira were shopping in Oxford, she had seen her leaving a café with her father. She was tall, as tall as Hal, wearing a black T-shirt with a pullover slung around her shoulders, jeans, and running shoes. She was saying something to him, smiling, and he was smiling back. She looks nice, Zoe had thought as she and Moira headed to the next shop, and thought no more about it. Her parents had lots of friends she hadn’t met.

  Now she recalled how back in September, before they saved the boy, her father had suggested going to Wales for the weekend. But her mother was busy, and she and her brothers had plans. Finally he had packed some clothes, his book about clouds, and his camera, and gone on his own. He had returned, voluble and relaxed, on Sunday evening and made a delicious roast chicken. And all the time, she thought, he had been with another woman.

  Across the hall Matthew’s radio wailed; from downstairs came television voices. Her parents were watching a program about the Renaissance. She could interrupt some genial historian, gesturing at the frescoes in a Florentine church. “Look at this,” she could say. Or she could leave the photographs on the kitchen counter. But as she flicked through the rest of the photos—mountains, clouds, a mug of coffee on a windowsill, clouds—she knew she would do neither. She had gone out with Ant for two months; still she’d been irked when, the week after she broke up with him, he had offered Moira a lift on his scooter. And irked, in a different way, when Moira refused. Her parents had been together for twenty years.

  A new song, more melodious, came on the radio. Suddenly she stopped daydreaming and thought about her mother, the person who was sitting on the sofa downstairs, who worked hard, who wanted to be a good person, who loved walking and now ancient Greek and who, they all understood, despite her skilled job, her good salary, her gift for reasoning, depended on their father in hidden ways. If she found out . . . Even in her thoughts, Zoe could not finish the sentence. Moira and several other friends had parents who were divorced. They made having two bedrooms sound glamorous. Here, in her one bedroom, she thought her father hadn’t just cheated; he had committed treason.

  The next morning, she waited until he was alone in the kitchen. “Hey, Dad”—she held out the envelope—“the woman at the chemist’s gave me your photos.”

  “Thanks.” He was drinking coffee, reading the paper. He opened the envelope absently, drew out the photographs, and quickly�
�she had put the woman on top—slid them back. “Tell your mother I forgot something at the forge,” he said, and headed for the door.

  Alone, she sat down in her father’s chair; his coffee cup was half full, still hot. She imagined him wedging the photos behind a horseshoe, or a row of tattered account books. Then she was no longer in her body, no longer in the kitchen of her home, but in some other limitless space, where she could simultaneously appreciate the wrinkled apple in the fruit bowl, Lily’s toy bear, the tea towels hanging limply on the radiator, the silvery drops of water in the sink, the leafy ficus in the corner, her father’s absence. And, briefly, they were all connected.

  Fourteen

  Duncan

  Lily made things better—he could answer more of Ms. Humphreys’s questions; the house didn’t feel empty—but even she could not prevent his family members from traveling toward their separate destinations. Night after night he woke to find himself searching for the beautiful room. Once he was in the parlor, another time standing over Zoe’s bed; happily, she did not wake. Before he went to nursery school his parents had told him that they were his parents, but that Betsy had not given birth to him. His birth mother was Turkish; she had given him up for adoption because she was young and poor. His birth father was unknown. Duncan had accepted these facts like a fairy tale in which he himself played a small part. Once upon a time there was a poor girl who had a baby boy. Then his parents came and found him. They brought him home when he was three days old, and he lived happily ever after. For years he had not thought about his first mother, but now he knew that when he sleepwalked, searching for the beautiful room, it was because she would be there, her skin the same color as his, her hands or her ears or her lower lip like his.