‘As well as what?’
He coloured and pushed back his chair. ‘Oh, you know.’ He began to stack the plates and bowls. ‘As well as for putting you out like this.’
The Hovel was a two-storey building with a sagging roof of pantiles. Gerald and I had been full of plans for it when we moved here fifteen years ago. First there was the holiday accommodation idea, and then the studio. Neither of them worked because we lacked the money and the will to convert the Hovel into something habitable, even on a temporary basis, by normal human beings. It was tiny. It didn’t have water, let alone a proper lavatory. It managed to be damp all the year round, whatever the weather. Everything we kept there went rusty or mouldy. We’d often talked about putting in a wood burner, but we never had.
So gradually the Hovel became what it was now: a cross between the garden shed and the place where we put things we didn’t really want but couldn’t bear to throw away. When they were younger, the children used it – first as a playhouse and then, when they were teenagers, for activities they thought we would disapprove of.
After we had cleaned away lunch, Jack and I went to the Hovel together. We kept it locked, because you could never be sure who might wander in from the Forest.
I showed him the ground floor first, a low-ceilinged room with the rusting remains of a cast-iron range in the fireplace. There was a dead blackbird in the grate, a desiccated and dusty collection of feathers and bones. It was gloomy in here because, apart from the open door, the only other light came from a grimy window on the side of the building facing the Forest.
Jack touched the handle of the lawnmower, unused since last autumn. ‘I could mow the lawn, if you like.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘I like gardens but I’m not so keen on gardening.’
‘No problem.’
An external flight of steps led up to the room above. I unlocked the door and went in. Jack stopped on the threshold. For a moment I saw it with his eyes: the clumsy stone walls which had lost most of the plaster that had once covered them; the delicate iron fireplace, a refugee from a smarter house; a small window, grey with dust and cobwebs, looking out on to the garden; the beams and rafters rising to the tiled roof that allowed specks of daylight into the room. There was an old mattress against the wall and a cluster of cigarette ends in the fireplace.
‘The floor’s OK,’ I said. ‘Gerald put down new boards just after we moved in. We had to take down the ceiling at the same time, but we never got round to replacing it.’
‘It’s fine as it is.’
‘I’m sure we can find you something better than that mattress. There’s no loo, I’m afraid.’
Jack shrugged. ‘I can go in the Forest or come up to the house.’
‘We can give you a potty,’ I said. ‘I have got rather a nice Victorian one in my studio, with a plant in it.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, smiling at me. ‘Everything’s perfect.’
We spent the next half hour playing house. That’s what it felt like – children pretending to set up a home. I even picked some daffodils and put them in a vase on the windowsill of the upper room.
Jack did the real work. He swept the room and brought up an inflatable camping mattress from the house, and then his backpack. I found blankets, torches and candles. He laid out his sleeping bag on the new mattress but he didn’t unpack his backpack.
He took off his jersey and rolled up his shirt sleeves as he worked. His arms were tanned, much more so than his face. There was something boyish about his movements – supple, swift, sometimes clumsy.
I opened my mouth to suggest he might like a radio to keep him company. But the words never came out. At that moment Jack was extending his right arm to hang his coat on a nail in the wall by the door. I saw his forearm. There was a scratch on the soft skin.
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Your arm. Underneath.’
He rotated the forearm and we both looked at the scratch. It was about three inches long. At one point it went quite deep and must have drawn a bit of blood. The skin had scabbed over but the wound beneath was rimmed with the reddish-pink of swollen flesh.
‘How did you do that?’
‘I don’t know.’ He turned away and patted the pockets of the coat, which he had emptied not five minutes before. ‘It’s nothing. Probably a nail or something.’
‘Have you cleaned it?’
‘Yes. It’s OK. I’ve had my jabs.’
It wasn’t the words, it was something in his voice. Don’t fuss. He was warning me off.
I turned aside and ran a duster over the windowsill, a pointless exercise in a room where the dirt was everywhere. Jack was right to shut me up. I’d been treating him as if he was a child, as if he were Tom or Annie, and I had a right to tell him what to do. But he wasn’t, and I didn’t.
So in a moment I asked him if he wanted a radio to keep him company. He said no thank you. He had rolled down his shirtsleeves by now and was in the process of putting on his jersey.
It seems so trivial, described baldly like that. But it wasn’t. Two things happened that afternoon which were both important, though I didn’t realize their significance until later.
First, there was the scratch and Jack’s reaction when I asked him about it. The other thing was that I’d learned that Jack wasn’t like the children or even Gerald.
He was Jack. He was different from everyone else.
Ten days passed.
It was astonishing how quickly our semi-detached lives became a routine. Gerald went off to work five days a week. I spent my time in the studio with Cannop and the radio for company. Occasionally I would come out to cook or to do a burst of housework. I went shopping. I saw friends. I talked to the children on the phone.
Meanwhile, Jack spent most of his days outside. It was a mild March that year with some wonderfully sunny days which seem to have been misplaced from May. He worked in the garden – first mowing the lawn, and then pruning the fruit trees and the climbing plants and the shrubs. When that was done, he attacked the brambles that had sprouted over the years into a small, vicious thicket in the corner by the Hovel. The soil was difficult to work – it was full of stones and scraps of smelted iron. It took him days to dig out the roots.
Every day, rain or shine, he went for a run in the Forest, and often a walk as well. We saw him, usually, at mealtimes, and sometimes he sat with us in the evenings and watched television.
We had the news on one evening and there was an item about Afghanistan. After half a minute, he stood up abruptly, said goodnight and left the room.
Gerald raised his eyebrows. Most of the time he gave the impression that he noticed very little about other people, but he could be surprisingly perceptive when he wanted to be. We heard the back door slam. Cannop sidled into the room and leapt on to my lap.
‘Something hasn’t healed,’ Gerald said. Then his eyes went back to the television.
The following afternoon, I took Jack a cup of tea. He was digging what had been a vegetable patch, though Gerald and I had long since lost interest in it. It was a nice afternoon and I carried my own mug outside as well. We sat in the sun on the bench under the apple tree.
Cannop had followed me out of the studio. He sat at a safe distance from us underneath the wheelbarrow. He stared at us.
Jack stared back. He seemed not to