Pike took the old bag and opened it.
‘Nothing inside,’ he pronounced.
‘Just so,’ said Brief, taking the bag and carefully folding it and putting it in his own. ‘It’s waiting to be filled with the things he’ll need for his life’s journey. Now, gentlemen . . . let us leave!’
They headed back along the track the way they had originally come until, the hedges on either side rising higher and the sky above dark before dawn, they were gone into shadows to ponder all they had witnessed and trek through the many seasons yet to come before their wyrd, and Jack’s and Katherine’s, might bring them together again.
23
AFTERMATH
‘Please say that again,’ said Margaret Foale.
She was talking on the phone to Roger Lynas, the same case officer from North Yorkshire who had been looking after Jack.
She had assumed this call was about Jack, and it had been until now. It seemed, however, that Jack was going to need years of operations and a long-term rehabilitation programme. The burns to his back, incurred while endeavouring to protect Katherine, were deep and particularly severe. That the boy had survived them at all was astonishing.
So any idea Margaret had harboured that she and Arthur might adopt him was out of the question. His situation was just too complex, the care he would need too specialist.
‘We have had incidents like this before,’ Lynas continued, ‘and there are very good homes for such cases.’
‘Institutions?’ Margaret had said.
‘Homes is the preferred word,’ said Lynas.
Then the sudden change.
‘But, Mrs Foale . . . I wanted to talk with you about the future of Katherine.’
Margaret blinked and her heart felt as though it was stopping.
She had been thinking about Katherine just before the call. The truth was that in the days and weeks since the crash she had begun to think a lot about Jack and Katherine.
Roger Lynas had promised to keep the Foales informed of what became of him, never expecting for a moment the drama and tragedy of what actually happened. Naturally when Margaret Foale learnt of the events, she and Arthur had visited Jack in the Birmingham hospital where he was taken after the crash.
They went again and that time met Clare and Katherine. A bond was formed, and it soon became clear how much support Clare would need. She took to the Foales – attracted by Margaret’s natural warmth and Arthur’s irascible good humour. Katherine took to them too, and they took her for walks in the hospital grounds when Clare was receiving treatment. No one was surprised, given the circumstances, that she attached herself to them more and more, as if in the Foales she found the kind of support that grandparents might have given had there been any, which there were not.
‘I want to talk to you about Katherine’s future. You and Professor Foale both. But this is not a conversation to have by telephone. Would you both be prepared to come over and talk about things?’
‘What things exactly . . . ?’
Her mind was beginning to race. So many emotions experienced in the past weeks, since their original conversation about Jack; so many changes in her inner world.
Now Lynas wanted to talk about Katherine.
‘Arthur?’ she called, after promising to call Roger Lynas back that same day.
‘Whatever is it?’ he said when he she called more urgently a second time. She was in tears. She knew it was rarely given to a couple such as them, who were unable to have children, to have such an opportunity later in life. Of course she had harboured hopes – from the first moment Katherine held her hand in the hospital grounds and Clare began to confide her fears for the future to her. Now . . .
‘I’m not sure what he wants to talk about but . . .’
‘We’ll go, of course,’ said Arthur.
Later that day she and Arthur found themselves seated in a makeshift conference room at Northfield General Hospital, the one nearest the scene of the accident which possessed the specialist staff able to help Clare Shore.
Katherine had been well looked after within the same hospital, while Jack had been taken off to a specialist burns unit in London.
‘But surely there are relatives she can go to?’
‘None on either side,’ said Lynas, ‘and Clare Shore has asked if you would be willing to be involved. Katherine wants it too, though of course she’s only a child. Even so, her attitude is important.’
‘What do they want exactly?’ said Arthur.
‘For you, to act as guardian. They trust you.’
Margaret had cried then. Their wish implied the greatest possible trust.
If she knew they were observing her closely, as professionals must, assessing, thinking ahead, working out what was best for the child, taking on board the mother’s wishes, weighing up the Foales’ suitability . . . Margaret didn’t show it.
What she said was, ‘I think perhaps that we ought to talk with them both, and then spend a little time with Katherine. That’s what we should do,’
Lynas smiled. He could not have wished for a better response.
They found Katherine sitting by her mother’s bed. She was clutching a soft toy, an old white horse.
‘Hello,’ she said, looking at Margaret. At Arthur she grinned.
Clare eased herself up in bed, her face lined with loss and pain, her eyes filled with worry for the future.
‘Hello, Katherine,’ Margaret said as she reached a hand out to Clare and smiled.
Clare’s return smile was bleak and tired.
Sedated, Margaret guessed.
‘Katherine wants you to take her out again.’
‘Do you?’ Margaret asked the child.
‘And McDonald’s again.’
Margaret glanced at Clare. The child’s mother nodded.
‘Of course,’ said Margaret.
She never subsequently called herself a ‘parent’, nor did she much like the idea of ‘guardian’, but whatever she and Arthur became as a result, it started right there and then when Katherine got up and reached out a small hand for Arthur to take.
‘Where are we going today?’ she asked.
Margaret was lost for words, but Arthur improvised.
‘Waseley Hill,’ he said promptly. ‘It’s only minutes away. Plenty of wet grass there! Is Mister Lynas going to come, too?’
Katherine looked appraisingly at Roger Lynas. ‘No,’ she replied.
So Arthur and Katherine went off alone, leaving the others behind with Clare Shore.
‘I think this could work out,’ said Roger Lynas, smiling at them both and starting to leave the room for them to talk.
Clare nodded, daring to think that she might have found a way forward for her child out of this tragedy and their deep loss.
‘And Jack?’ she whispered.
‘Just extraordinary,’ said Lynas at the doorway. ‘He’s the toughest child I’ve ever known in all my years in this job. By rights he shouldn’t be alive, but he is recovering much faster than the doctors could hope.’
Clare was already closing her eyes when he left, daring to finally sleep properly and begin to heal, knowing she had done all a mother could, but she still wanted to say something more.
‘What is it, Clare?’
‘Jack looked after Katherine so closely during the . . . accident,’ she whispered, before adding, ‘and I think he always will. And then . . .’
‘What?’ asked Margaret.
There were people who came and helped before the ambulance came. I thought they were in my imagination but Katherine told me she saw them. Little people . . .
But Clare did not voice this aloud. It was too strange, too quirky and too irrational.
‘That night of the crash the sky seemed to crack open and I saw such a fire, as if the Universe itself had opened. Its light shone on Katherine. Margaret . . .’
‘My dear?’
‘I think this was meant to be and that you and Arthur were meant to come into our lives now. I r
eally believe that. That’s why it feels right for you and Arthur to look after her.’
Her eyes closed and she looked more comfortable and at peace than for days.
‘Will you . . . ?’ she whispered.
‘We’ll look after you both,’ said Margaret Foale, taking her hand. ‘Now sleep, just sleep.’
So Clare finally let herself do so – comforted by a woman who was barely more than a stranger to her but felt like the mother she had never known.
24
THE CALL
‘Jack?’
Katherine spoke his name hesitantly, beginning to doubt it was really him. His voice sounded different.
‘Er . . . yes?’ he said uncertainly. She didn’t sound like a little girl any more.
‘Jack?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Katherine. Katherine Shore.’
‘Yes?’ he repeated, as if keeping his distance.
Clare Shore had been chronically incapacitated since the car accident that had killed her husband, and nearly killed Jack as well. Katherine had come sometimes to see Jack in the hospital afterwards, but even those visits had trailed off when he was about eleven. Since then there had only been the regular cards at Christmas and on his birthday.
‘It’s Mum . . .’
He assumed at once that her mother must have died. But that wasn’t quite the reason Katherine had phoned.
‘She’s near the end now, Jack, and she wants to see you.’
But Jack found he didn’t want to revisit those memories. They had left too many painful scars both in his mind and on his body.
‘Jack?’
‘It might not be easy,’ he said evasively.
‘She needs to see you and . . . and I . . .’
I need to see you because I don’t know where else to turn.
Something switched back on in Jack’s mind. She needed him.
He breathed in deep and asked her, ‘What’s wrong? Apart from your mother that is?’
‘Something happened.’
‘What happened?’
His voice was suddenly protective. He didn’t understand why he felt like this for someone he hardly knew, and who reminded him only of hard times. But he did.
The burns to his back and neck he had suffered while saving her life had been so bad that he had since had to endure years of skin grafts and general rehabilitation. Each operation, each bout of postoperative care, had been arduous.
Three people especially had helped see him through those early years: Margaret Foale and Katherine and Roger Lynas, his original social worker. Arthur had always stayed in the background.
Clare Shore was never well enough to travel comfortably, so she had remained in the periphery of Jack’s life. But what he did know was that she and Katherine were now sharing the Foales’ huge house in Berkshire. It had started as an arrangement of mutual convenience, with Clare providing an injection of capital into their home, while needing a new home for herself and her young daughter. But what had started out as a temporary arrangement had almost inevitably become permanent. And so the childless Margaret suddenly found she had two children to think about.
Yet the early friendship between Jack and Katherine was only tenuous at best, based on a chance meeting that had ended in tragedy for all concerned.
As time went on, both children found her visits increasingly difficult, and their interests developed in different directions – Jack towards the conventional urban activities of the other children with whom he shared a home, Katherine towards country pursuits like a pre-teen passion for horses.
Then the disastrous day when Katherine came to visit him in the children’s hospital, and he complained angrily that the doctors were insisting on yet another operation.
‘They’re doctors,’ she argued conclusively, as if that made them gods. At the time she was only ten, he eleven.
Jack was in pain, angry and frightened, and was stung by this seeming lack of sympathy, otherwise he’d never have said what he did. What he said next he regretted too late.
‘You’re on their side,’ he yelled, ‘like everyone else around here. You know nothing about what I’m going through, nothing . . . If it hadn’t been for . . .’
He stopped, the words half out.
If it hadn’t been for your parents picking me up this might never have happened to me.
Katherine didn’t need to hear the words to know what he had been going to say.
‘And if it hadn’t been for you . . .’ she shouted back.
. . . then my father might still be alive and my mother not permanently ill.
Maybe it was worse that the words were never properly said on either side, because the hurt and anger remained and grew.
Katherine hadn’t seen him since, and although he’d bitterly regretted what he’d said, he’d never had the courage to apologize. While Katherine, feeling that in some way it was her fault that Jack had suffered the way he had, couldn’t bear to face him and see that recrimination in his face again. Eventually Mrs Foale started visiting alone, having come to accept that the two of them probably needed some time apart, and to find better circumstances for meeting than a hospital bedside.
So, apart from cards at Christmas and on birthdays, the silence between them had lasted five long years.
But now Katherine was on the phone, claiming that something had happened. Something she needed to talk about.
‘What happened?’ he said again.
‘It’s about Arthur.’
‘Arthur?’
‘What about him?’
‘He’s disappeared.’ There was a wobble in her voice. ‘And with Mum so weak, I didn’t know . . . I needed . . .’
‘What?’ said Jack.
There was a long silence.
Eventually Katherine spoke more calmly. ‘Jack, I need someone to talk to.’
The clock turned back ten years in a flash, and all pain, all doubt, all anger over their long time apart, fled away and was no more.
It wasn’t just for her mother she had rung; it was for herself, and that was different.
‘I’ll have to make some arrangements this end,’ said Jack impulsively, ‘but it’s all right, I’ll come.’
25
TALK
Jack called Katherine back the next day.
They began talking and then didn’t stop, sharing the details of their lives during the recent years. That same evening they talked again.
‘When you think about it, we don’t seem to have much in common,’ Katherine said, amazed how easy it was just talking to him, but . . .
‘You’re right, maybe I’d better not come,’ said Jack, misinterpreting what she meant.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, though suddenly uncertain.
There was a long silence.
‘Of course I want to come,’ he said finally.
He found himself astonished by what he had so nearly added, which was: I’ve missed talking to you all these years, Katherine, and lately I’ve been thinking of, well, a lot of things. I’ve kept thinking of you and I don’t know why. Now this has happened, and it feels right.
It was true. For months before her phone call she had been on his mind.
That Spring he began noticing what he never had before – the new warmth in the air, the colours of life, buds on the urban trees, and sometimes, overhead in the evening, flocks of birds migrating from southern Europe. It had made him feel imprisoned and restless – made him think of the Foales, their country house and Katherine, and wish he was in touch with her again. Now here she was on the end of the line, a wish come true.
But Jack wasn’t going to admit any of that.
Instead, embarrassed by his own thoughts, and not guessing she was thinking much the same, he protested again, ‘Of course I want to see you.’
Me too she thought. Me too, Jack . . . But all she managed was, ‘That’s cool!’
‘Tell me about where you live,’ said Jack impulsively, to change the su
bject.
‘The house is right across the valley from White Horse Hill,’ she said. ‘The White Horse is a carving in the chalk. I sent you a picture of it once.’
That same little card was, for no reason he ever understood, one of the very few things he truly treasured. It had pride of place in his postcard collection, and had come to represent all kind of things to him, the greatest of these being freedom. He had often imagined visiting all those places in Katherine’s postcards, riding on a great White Horse, but he never imagined visiting the White Horse itself.
‘I’ve still got it,’ he said. Then added: ‘Do you remember what you wrote on the back of the card?’
‘Yes,’ she said, softly.
It had come to mean everything to him because she gave it to him in hospital soon after some especially painful and difficult surgery, and just before their argument.
Look at this horse when you need to, like I do, she wrote. Imagine you’re on its back and it can take you anywhere you want at any time . . . to a place where there’s no pain, just good things. Love, Katherine.
He had read those words a thousand times, and travelled the whole world with her on that horse.
Love, Katherine.
He doubted he would ever tell her, or anyone, how he treasured those last two words inscribed on her postcards.
Next day he called her again.
‘I’m coming this afternoon,’ he said.
‘Great. I’ll arrange for a taxi to meet you.’
‘It’s already done. They’re paying for a cab.’
‘The whole way?’
Jack laughed. ‘That’s social services for you. It’s to do with spare funding of transport for people like me. Very weird – just shows sometimes they get things right. I’ll be turning up about four.’
‘In time for tea.’
‘Sounds quaint.’
‘You remember how Mrs Foale likes that kind of thing and . . .’
‘What?’
‘. . . so do I.’
26
ROOM WITH A VIEW