Starve Acre Read online

  Harrie looked at her and eventually said, ‘You need help. You really do.’

  Richard led Harrie away and Juliette went into the room with the hare over her shoulder.

  ‘I can’t stand it,’ said Harrie. ‘What the hell is wrong with her?’

  ‘I’ll speak to her again in the morning,’ said Richard.

  Harrie opened her palms and looked down at the bib of blood on her chest.

  ‘Go and wash,’ said Richard. ‘I’ll take Cass away. I’ll bury her.’

  But Harrie was staring past him, shaking her head.

  When he turned to look, Juliette was laying the hare in the cot.

  She stroked its back and ears, then, seeing that Richard and Harrie were watching her, she closed the door and locked it.

  Fetching one of the wooden crates he’d used to trap the hare, Richard went to the guest room and found that Harrie had draped a pillowcase over the dog’s body. Blood had seeped through the blue cotton like oil stains.

  He lifted the bundle into the box and then carried the box out to the garden. A soft drizzle was falling and in the light from the kitchen window he dug a hole by the greenhouse.

  On the lane, he heard Sam Westbury going past in his truck and wondered if he had any expertise when it came to hares. He surely had to deal with them in his hayfield. He’d know how to trap them. Or better still, how to kill them. It seemed the only recourse now, the animal being so aggressive. If it could be chased out of the house and into the glare of a shotgun . . . But perhaps it was best to do it well away from Juliette. Quietly. A snare in the wood or something. Though he suspected the hare would be too shrewd to be snagged like that.

  With the pit deep enough, he stabbed the spade into the soil and rolled Cass out of the wooden box. Her injuries were obvious as she tumbled free of her shroud. The hare had ripped open her belly, and almost severed one leg.

  Just after midnight, the phone rang twice in the hallway but as Richard came to the top of the stairs, Harrie had already picked it up.

  ‘Yes, it’s me, Osman,’ she said, wedging the receiver between her ear and her shoulder to light a cigarette. ‘Thanks for calling back . . . Yes, I know what time it is . . . Yes, I appreciate that . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t know . . . No, I can’t speak up . . . Well, why do you think I can’t?’

  She took a drag and breathed out a curl of smoke.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘things are not all right. That’s why I wanted to speak to you . . . Well, I’d say it was urgent . . . Look, I can’t get her to leave the house . . . You’ll have to come here . . .

  ‘Well, no,’ said Harrie, tapping off the beak of ash. ‘She hasn’t agreed to see you as such. But then she’s hardly thinking sensibly, is she? . . . No, no, fuck getting her consent, we’ll all be dead and buried by then. I’m asking you to come . . . I’m her sister, isn’t that enough? . . . I’m not being aggressive . . . Yes, yes I know it’s late . . . But, she’s so unwell, Osman. It’s breaking my heart to see her like this . . . I don’t know what those bloody people said to her the other night . . .’

  She drew on her cigarette and then wiped her eyes.

  ‘What if you were to come as a guest, not as a doctor? Then it would be a social visit, not a consultation . . . of course there would be a difference . . . Yes, I know you’d need to be invited first, I’ll talk to Richard about it . . . Look, you did say you’d help, didn’t you? . . . Then why are you being so evasive?’

  Harrie listened for some time, letting the cigarette smoulder between her fingers.

  ‘Just get to the point, Osman,’ she said. ‘Will you come or not?’

  The answer was obviously curt.

  ‘Is that can’t or won’t?’ said Harrie and put the phone down.

  After sitting for a moment she squashed her cigarette into the ashtray.

  ‘I take it you heard all that?’ she said, knowing that Richard was there. ‘You must be pleased.’

  Richard went down to the hallway. Harrie’s knuckles and wrists were hashed with scratches from the hare’s claws.

  ‘Aren’t they sore?’ he said.

  Harrie looked at him. ‘Don’t change the subject, Richard. I want to know why you were listening to a private phone call.’

  ‘It can’t have been that private if you took it in the hallway,’ he said, holding her hand to examine the injuries more closely.

  The cuts across the base of her thumb were still weeping and she tightened her lips with the pain.

  ‘I should drive you down to see the doctor,’ said Richard. ‘You don’t want them infected.’

  ‘I’m more than capable of washing my own hands,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, but you need something on the wounds. There’s probably some iodine in the bathroom.’

  He let go and she inspected the lacerations herself.

  ‘I’ve never seen an animal be that fierce before,’ she said. ‘I just couldn’t stop it. It was so strong.’

  ‘It was probably just frightened,’ said Richard.

  ‘No,’ said Harrie. ‘It came looking for Cass.’

  ‘Why would it do that?’

  ‘I’m just telling you what happened, Richard.’

  ‘Cass didn’t go for it first?’

  ‘Of course not. She was terrified. She didn’t know what was going on.’

  Angry and exhausted, Harrie shook another cigarette from the packet and lit up. Even though she’d cleaned her hands, there was still blood in her hair and behind her ear.

  ‘I’ll get it out of the house,’ said Richard. ‘I’ll make sure I take it well away so that it doesn’t come back.’

  ‘You’ll kill it?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘How?’ said Harrie. ‘Juliette won’t open the door.’

  ‘Things just got heated,’ Richard said. ‘She’ll come round.’

  ‘I don’t think so. You saw the look in her eyes.’

  Richard turned back up the stairs. ‘Let me go and speak to her then,’ he said.

  ‘She won’t listen. Not here. Not while she’s obsessing over that animal. She needs proper care, Richard.’

  ‘In a hospital?’

  ‘Is there any other choice now?’

  He left her smoking and climbed to the upper floor, switching on the lights as he went. At the door of the nursery he spoke Juliette’s name, but his pleas were drowned out by the sound of the cradle rocking on the floorboards. He tried the handle. He beat the flat of his hand against the wood. In response, Juliette switched on Ewan’s old record player and Richard paused to listen, trying to work out when she had retrieved it from the boxes in the scullery. Or, rather, how. She’d been barely out of Harrie’s sight all day. It had to have been taken opportunistically. It wasn’t in her nature to be devious. She’d had a moment of weakness, that was all, and Richard knew that she would be punishing herself for re-opening Ewan’s life.

  ‘I only want to know that you’re all right,’ he said.

  But she turned up the volume on ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ until the voice and piano buckled into noise.

  Richard waited, rattled the handle once more, and then went down to the study. In the hallway, he heard Harrie ringing Osman again. There was little point. Even if he could be persuaded to speak to Juliette, it was hard to see what difference he’d make.

  The psychiatrist his mother had summoned to Starve Acre when his father’s behaviour could no longer be passed off as tiredness or eccentricity had made at least half a dozen visits at thirty pounds a time and got nowhere. It had been the same at Brackenburn too. The problem was that his father didn’t think that there was anything wrong with him. So what use was a cure for a man who wasn’t ill? It would be like trying to put out an unlit fire.

  Even after – what was it now? – eleven or twelve years since his father had passed on it was still easy to picture Brackenburn, with its smell of mop buckets and kitchens and the long corridors like cloisters. There was always someone wailing somewhere. The nurses
always running.

  In the room where Richard’s father had died and his mind had finally switched off, there’d been nothing but a wooden table and starched sheets. A subtle bar across the window.

  There had to be something better for Juliette than that.

  Richard had begun to think that Harrie was right. It was doing Juliette no good being here at Starve Acre. She did need to get away. Not back to her family but to some neutral ground where she might be able to think more clearly. Perhaps Stella might put them up for a few days and give them some space. The more the idea coalesced, the more crucial it seemed to extract Juliette from the house as soon as he could.

  The following afternoon, Richard heard Harrie making her way up the stairs to the study. She didn’t knock.

  ‘It’s Juliette,’ she said, beckoning him out of his seat. ‘She’s gone. She’s taken Ewan’s old pram. It’s not in the scullery.’

  They went on to the lane and looked in both directions. Richard called for Juliette and got nothing back.

  ‘Will she have gone down to the village?’ said Harrie.

  Another call and more silence.

  ‘Where did she used to walk with Ewan? To the grocer’s? She won’t have gone to your friend’s house, will she?’

  Richard didn’t think so but Harrie still persuaded him to phone Gordon, who offered to go and look for her in the van straight away.

  ‘And if I find her?’ he said.

  ‘Just call the house,’ said Richard. ‘Harrie will be here.’

  But by the time he’d hung up she was already out of the door and fishing her keys from her pocket. Richard got into the Austin’s passenger seat and Harrie started the engine at the third attempt.

  From the drive, she turned left and followed the lane as it ran along the edge of the moor. After a while, it swung into the lonelier heartland, where it rose and fell and eventually dropped down into Micklebrow some three miles further on.

  Ewan had always enjoyed playing the guide whenever they walked here. He liked to trace their progress on the Ordnance Survey sheet with his finger, delighted that the symbols matched what he could actually see; that he, Mummy and Daddy could be there in real life and in the world of the paper map at the same time. He never made it all the way to Micklebrow on foot, however, even though he protested that he could. After a mile or so he began to drag his heels and they’d stop to rest at the Siblings.

  The four erratic boulders were balanced on an outcrop of limestone and though Richard had explained to Ewan how they’d got there – how they’d been inched down from Ribblehead by the glaciers thirteen thousand years ago – the boy preferred the story that Gordon had told him. That these mossy Silurian blocks were really the sons and daughters of a widower who, terrified of losing them as he had his wife, had found some means to turn them into stone and preserve them for eternity. The logic was untidy, but that didn’t matter. If you put your ear to the rock you could hear them talking. If you left a flower in one of the cracks it would be gone the next day. No, not eaten by sheep or whipped away by the wind but taken as a gift from one living child to another.

  The others in Ewan’s class teased him for believing such a tale and he couldn’t understand why. Juliette explained that they were just being mean, that they were making fun of him because they couldn’t think of anything better to do. But it wasn’t unusual, Dr Monk had told them at the clinic, for some children to have difficulty separating the imaginary from the actual. They couldn’t choose. To them, everything was real.

  It had been Ellis who’d made the appointment for them with Monk. He hadn’t been able to speak highly enough of her. Juliette had been much relieved to know that there was someone who might be able to help them, and Richard had been glad to see her smile again. But, they ought not to have gone. They should have known before they got there how Ewan would be. He hadn’t bought any of their lies about where they were going and why, and by the time they arrived he’d been tense and reluctant.

  She’d seen it all before, though, Monk, and when she called them from the waiting room into her office she merely noted Ewan’s opposition and asked her colleague to take him into the soft toy playroom along the corridor while she spoke to Mr and Mrs Willoughby.

  She was hawk-nosed, greying, with cheeks of broken veins and would have probably been quite intimidating to children if not for a kindliness in her eyes.

  ‘Mummy and Daddy won’t be long,’ she said. ‘You’ll not be far away.’ And with glum resignation the boy sloped off behind the nurse.

  Juliette did most of the talking as Monk took down Ewan’s case history, recalling everything that had happened over the previous year and coming eventually to the Burnsalls’ pony.

  ‘He said that someone told him to do it,’ Juliette added.

  ‘Another child?’ said Monk, looking up with her pen poised.

  ‘No, someone he’d imagined,’ said Juliette. ‘Someone called Jack Grey.’

  Monk nodded.

  ‘He’s convinced the voice is real,’ Juliette insisted.

  ‘That’s not uncommon.’

  ‘You’ve treated children like Ewan before, then?’ asked Richard.

  ‘I’ve treated plenty of children who’ve had auditory hallucinations,’ said Monk, capping her pen with exactness. ‘But whether that’s what’s happening with Ewan is another matter.’

  ‘But it must be,’ said Juliette.

  ‘I know that seems like the logical answer,’ Monk replied. ‘But I’d have to spend some time with Ewan before I was able to make a diagnosis like that. And it may be that I can’t.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Juliette said.

  ‘Well, it could turn out that there is no condition for me to diagnose, Mrs Willoughby.’

  ‘But it’s all there,’ said Juliette looking at Monk’s notebook. ‘You can’t tell me there’s nothing wrong with him. That isn’t normal behaviour for a five-year-old.’

  Monk smiled at her. ‘I have to be very sure,’ she said, ‘before I attach a label to a child. It’s not something I aim for.’

  ‘How much time?’ asked Juliette.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘How much time will you need with him? Weeks? Months?’

  Frowning a little, Monk said, ‘That’s not something I can tell you just yet, I’m afraid. I’ll speak to him today, of course, and perhaps I might be able to give you some idea after that.’

  ‘We’re just concerned about him missing school,’ said Richard.

  ‘You’ve removed him from the one he was attending, have you?’ said Monk, leafing back through her notes.

  ‘We had no choice,’ said Juliette, and Richard concurred.

  The head had tried to persuade them to let Ewan stay but when they’d asked her how he could possibly sit in a class full of farmers’ children day in day out after what he’d done, she didn’t have an answer.

  ‘Well, I’m sure that a short break won’t do him any harm,’ said Monk. ‘And it might be that a new school will make a big difference to his behaviour. It does happen.’

  ‘So, we can look for somewhere else?’ said Juliette.

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘A normal school?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Monk, ‘a normal school.’

  ‘But will they take him? Given the way he is?’

  Monk thought for a moment and looked at them both. ‘What we need to do,’ she said, ‘is to try and ascertain whether his aggression is likely to flare up again in the future. And the way to do that is to work out what it is that triggers these episodes in the first place.’

  ‘Ewan’s not aggressive,’ said Juliette.

  She saw that Monk was re-reading the account of the spring fair.

  ‘What I mean is, he shouldn’t be,’ Juliette continued. ‘Richard and I aren’t like that. Ewan’s just unwell.’

  ‘Tell me when you think it began,’ said Monk. ‘Was it when he started school, or before?’

  ‘It was school for sure. He was n
ever like this before he went to Holy Cross,’ said Juliette.

  ‘He gave you no cause for concern at all?’

  ‘Not in this way, no.’

  ‘Does he have friends?’

  ‘Not as such.’

  ‘What about when he was at nursery school? Did he play with the other children there?’

  ‘Sometimes. When he could. He wasn’t quite as far on as they were. He was born prematurely, as I said.’

  ‘He found his own games to play?’

  Juliette put her hand flat on the table. ‘Look, I know where you’re going with this – that he was lonely and made up a friend in his head.’

  ‘It is a possibility,’ said Monk.

  ‘But the voice he hears isn’t friendly,’ Richard said. ‘It terrifies him.’

  ‘All children have the capability to make fantasies seem very real,’ said Monk.

  ‘Some more than others, though?’ Juliette said.

  ‘There are children who are genuinely confused between the two, yes,’ said Monk.

  ‘That’s Ewan, then.’

  ‘Again, it might seem the case, Mrs Willoughby, but we really need to try and understand how this voice seems to him. Whether it sounds as if it’s coming from outside or if it is just an echo in his imagination. You said yourself, Mr Willoughby, that your friend told Ewan stories about this Jack Grey.’

  ‘Does it matter how the voice got into his head?’ Richard said. ‘Surely the important thing is that we get it out.’

  ‘In which case we need to get to the root of Ewan’s unhappiness.’

  ‘What can he possibly be unhappy about?’ said Juliette. ‘We give him everything.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with what he has, unfortunately,’ Monk replied. ‘If it were, then it would make my job very simple. It’s to do with how he feels. Those are two very different things.’

  ‘Aren’t they connected at all?’

  ‘Not so directly as you might think.’

  ‘And will Ewan need medication?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘If you diagnose him with something, will he need to take pills?’

  ‘Mrs Willoughby,’ said Monk. ‘That’s a long way down the road. I can’t possibly say. Hopefully not.’