Starve Acre Read online

  Her opinion of Ewan coloured by what had happened with Susan Drewitt, Richard assumed that young Miss Clarke was exaggerating, but on the afternoon of the performance in the school hall, Ewan had made for a decidedly listless shepherd. While the others were earnestly proffering their lambs to the Christ-child he stood by the wings raking the bottom of his crook against the stage. He took no bow at the end of ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ and stayed silent on the journey home, despite Richard and Juliette’s attempts at praise.

  The holidays came around, the temperature fell sharply, and, with a great deal of persuasion, Richard managed to get Ewan to come and see the frozen beck. Of course, once he was actually there, he enjoyed himself just as much as Richard had promised he would. He skidded on the ice, tested its firmness with jumps and kicks, took pleasure at hearing the sound of his voice echoing in the winter wood. Then, as they walked back up to the house for lunch, it started snowing and Ewan let go of Richard’s hand and ran this way and that, trying to catch the flakes.

  By the late afternoon, the whole of Croftendale was covered and Richard and Juliette took Ewan back to the field to build a snowman.

  Perhaps it was purely the novelty of finding the place so altered by the weather, but it wasn’t long before the boy seemed to rediscover the joy of playing there.

  It was school, Richard thought. That was at the root of his unhappiness. It couldn’t suit every child. Especially a child like Ewan, who struggled to keep pace with his peers. In a small place like Holy Cross, it was more noticeable too. Perhaps it might be better to enrol him in one of the bigger primaries in Skipton? Or even for Juliette to teach him at home? But he knew that she would be resistant to either of those suggestions. For her, the village school was one of the details that affirmed the goodness of country living, along with the ribbons at the spring fair, the sound of faint Sunday church bells, white sheep on green hillsides, and this – their own field deep in snow two days before Christmas.

  The ball that she and Ewan had been rolling down the slope had congealed into a sizeable boulder by the time it was on flat ground. They rubbed and patted it smooth, while Richard made the snowman’s head. Naturally, Juliette had come prepared and from the pockets of her duffle coat she handed Ewan a carrot and some pieces of coal she’d taken from the bucket by the fire. Richard lifted him up and he assembled the face, carefully studding in the mouth until it was the proper shape of a smile. Now all the fellow needed was a hat and scarf, and Richard was badgered from both sides until he parted with the ones he was wearing. His protest against the idea had seemed perfectly legitimate: surely a snowman had to stay cold in order for him not to become a puddle? But Ewan gave him a derisive look – it was identical to Juliette’s – and logic was trumped by aesthetics.

  ‘He’s got to be dressed, Daddy.’

  ‘Even if it means I freeze?’

  Ewan shrugged. Rules were rules. And after the ensuing snowball fight Richard trudged back to the house unable to feel his ears and neck.

  In front of the fire with a glass of Scotch, the chill subsided, but Juliette wanted to play nurse and he’d happily let her. She rubbed the feeling back into his hands and after putting Ewan to bed filled the bath for two. The moment of contentment he felt as she took off her dressing gown and lay back against him in the hot water continued for the rest of the night. Actually, it was more than contentment. It was the relief of not having to think about Ewan’s future for the time being. That afternoon in the field had proved that he could still be happy. He could still seem like their little boy.

  They washed one another, dried themselves, made love, and slept with an easy quietness. Juliette rested properly for the first time in weeks and didn’t even stir when Ewan got up early the next morning and went downstairs.

  Richard lay in bed and listened to him creeping about in the hallway and then opening and closing the front door with the stealth of a departing burglar.

  Going to the window, he watched Ewan high-stepping through the snow in his wellingtons. Rather endearingly, he paused by the lane to check if there were any cars coming, even though it was the deathly silent morning of Christmas Eve and the tarmac was under a two-foot drift.

  In bed, Juliette gave a long inward breath and stretched out under the blanket. Richard was glad when she lay still again. If she’d seen Ewan, she would have been banging on the window and telling him to come inside. It was better that the boy was left to go and explore. Wasn’t that exactly what Juliette wanted? For him to be a country lad who went out on winter mornings and was taught as much (if not more) among the fields and fells and woods as he was in the classroom.

  Down the slope, Ewan followed the line of the trench he and Juliette had peeled open during the construction of the snowman the day before and stood in the giant’s bulky shadow. From there he carried on to the bounds of the wood, picking up fallen sticks. The snowman needed arms. Perhaps a besom too.

  The deadfall gathered, Ewan retraced his boot holes and dumped the bundle at his feet. As he separated what he’d collected, he seemed compelled to look behind him towards the middle of the field as if he were half seeing the oak tree again, as if it loomed over him.

  From the pile on the ground, he selected a long branch and snapped it in half over his knee as he’d seen Richard do to make kindling.

  As he moved around to the side of the snowman, he stumbled a little and got up again, adjusting his bobble hat so that he could see where he was inserting the stick. With both hands he drove it into the snowman’s shoulder but didn’t stop until it had come out of the other side. He did the same with the other branches, ramming each one through the torso and turning the snowman into St Sebastian. Then, taking the two ends of Richard’s scarf, he pulled until the head was severed and fell to the ground.

  Richard would have kept Juliette away from the window, but she’d got out of bed so quietly that he hadn’t noticed she was up until she was next to him, tugging the other curtain aside. By then, Ewan was breaking the carrot nose and stamping out the smile.

  It was nothing, he said to her. Ewan was only doing to the snowman what children enjoyed doing to their own sandcastles. But she was already getting dressed.

  ‘You let him go out on his own?’ she said. ‘You watched him do that?’

  In her coat and boots, she crossed the lane to the field and he followed her, repeating what he’d said in the bedroom. She was overreacting. There was nothing wrong. It’d be best to leave him be. But on reaching Ewan, Juliette took hold of his arm and smacked his backside until he cried as hard as she thought he ought to do. Trying to get between them, Richard did his best to reason with her, but she was too incensed and distraught to listen and dragged the boy back through the snow to the house.

  There was no point hoping to see the hare any more now that it was dark, and Richard picked up the two boxes he’d used to remove the animal from the study. They stank of sour urine and had been scratched and chewed enough in places for the wood to have given way. A good thing that he hadn’t had to go very far. Still, the show of strength was exhilarating. He’d rarely come so close to such brute energy. He was glad to have seen the potency he’d imagined in the bones released with such an emphatic burst. There must have been joy in it for the hare too. To have known itself again; to have given itself back to the dark.

  While Richard had been listening to the trickle of the beck, the moon had cleared the tree tops and the night was turning star-rich. He didn’t want to go back to the house just yet and went to the tent to work, leaving the flaps open so that he could have the evening inside with him.

  With the gas lamp purring, he moved to the other side of the hole and continued to dig carefully with the edge of the trowel. At the third or fourth pass the blade bit down and chipped off a sliver of something hard. Smoothing off the mud with his thumb, Richard saw that it was a small piece of wood and, gouging in the hole with his fingers, he felt a length of root just under the surface of the soil.

  For the n
ext hour, he raked away at the earth, lying on his belly to scoop out a cavity, scraping off the filth with his hands.

  The root ran diagonally through the rectangle, discoloured by the blackness of mud and time. Whether it had belonged to the Stythwaite Oak was impossible to tell at first glance. So little was known about what had actually happened here over the last few centuries that the history of the field was mostly guesswork. It seemed infertile now, but how long had that been the case? There was nothing to say that another tree couldn’t have grown and died here at some point. A sample of what he’d exposed would have to be taken for dating to be absolutely sure, but if it were part of the Oak, then he must still have been digging some way out from the trunk. The root was not particularly substantial, given the tree’s purported size. It must have tapered down at this point from a much greater girth.

  This was his strategy then: to trace each stem he found back to its source as far as he could and little by little try to pinpoint where the tree might once have grown.

  After wiping his hands on his jeans, he jotted down some notes in the book and wrote: ‘ill equipped, Willoughby!’ – underlining it twice. It was true. He had no camera with him, no maps on which to plot what he’d found. It had taken him by surprise. The dig had been a distraction, and actually unearthing something had suddenly made it all complicated.

  He sat for a while looking at the root, planning where he would search next. Might he need a second tent? Some extra tarpaulin to stake out over each new plot he made? How would he keep the roots from drying out? He felt that he should contact Stella and get her opinion; this was her area of expertise.

  She was a good strategist, too, and he knew that she would encourage him to use what he’d found to his advantage and play the university powers at their own game. They’d called his temporary expulsion ‘research leave’ but hadn’t really expected him to do anything other than mourn for Ewan. If he could show them that in fact he’d been doing exactly what they’d told him to do with his time, then they could have little reason to keep him away any longer. There would have to be some reward for his obedience.

  He knew that Stella would fight his corner on that score, but not without some reassurances about Juliette. She would want to know that she was well enough to be left alone when Richard returned to campus.

  Juliette was different; he could say that. But how he’d phrase the way in which she’d changed would take some thought. Her behaviour was so odd. He had noticed in her something of the nesting instinct she’d had before Ewan was born, but it was much more erractic. He’d find her repairing something – a door handle, a broken plate – and then five minutes later she’d be out in the garden weeding one of the beds. She’d have the radio on over-loud in the kitchen as she mopped the floor, and by the time he’d gone down to switch it off she’d be making her way slowly along the hallway in silent meditation. He tried to talk to her on all such occasions, but she gave no response other than a calm smile. Could he say, then, that she was happy?

  When he came back to the house, Harrie was at the front door looking for him.

  ‘It’s Juliette,’ she said, when he came inside.

  ‘What about her? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Go on,’ she said, looking at the stairs. ‘Go and see.’

  He went up with Harrie behind him.

  ‘Keep going,’ she said, when they came to the first landing.

  Above him on the upper floor he could hear Juliette walking over the bare boards and the sound of things being moved about. When he came to Ewan’s room, the door was propped open with one of his larger teddy bears and Juliette was taking down the old boxes of jigsaws from the top of the dresser.

  ‘They’re always looking for donations at the church,’ she said, and went back to what she was doing.

  Harrie touched Richard’s shoulder and whispered in his ear.

  ‘Go and wash your hands. And then come and help.’

  Over the course of the evening, talking only about the practicalities of what they were doing, they removed the mattress Juliette had been sleeping on and took all the mirrors back to the rooms where they belonged. Harrie stripped Ewan’s bed and carried the sheets downstairs to be washed along with the clothes that had been hanging in the wardrobe for the last six months. Gloves were reunited, little woolly hats dusted off. Shoes went into a carrier bag and sat against the wall like a sack of potatoes.

  Exactly what had made Juliette choose to start this now, Richard couldn’t work out. All evening he’d been waiting for her to realise the enormity of her decision and call the process to a halt, but it seemed as though, having embarked on the task, she wanted to complete it quickly and thoroughly. He had surprised himself too. Spending more time in Ewan’s room than he had for months, he’d expected to be tormented. But with the spring here memories had truly started to feel like the stuff of the past. When the boy came to him now, it was not with the same intensity. Rather than smothering him, he lingered at the edge of his thoughts, which was the proper place for the dead. The only place. And returning the room to a shell would keep him there.

  ‘I’ll start on the toys, shall I?’ said Richard and knelt down by the window to collect up the litter of dice and playing cards, conkers and dominoes.

  The dressing-up clothes were all stuffed into a wicker chest and could stay that way. The child who received them next would not want everything neatly matched. They would enjoy pulling things out at random, as Ewan had done, and pair a space suit with an Apache headdress, or run around the garden half Zorro, half Robin Hood.

  With the basket out on the landing, Richard went about the room picking up the other odds and ends – the cars and bricks and rubber dinosaurs. Finally, he crouched down by the train set and started to pack it away, removing the little station and the water tower, uncoupling the engine from its fleet of yellow hoppers. The track came up piece by piece until only the shape of it remained, outlined with dust on the rug.

  He closed the box, sealed it with tape and wrote on the lid with a marker pen. Soon, there were other boxes lined up against the wall – BOOKS, TEDDY BEARS, GAMES, CARS – which they carried down to the scullery.

  ‘We could take some things to the church tomorrow,’ said Juliette and Harrie agreed.

  ‘If you like,’ she said and then, tentatively, making it seem off-hand, she suggested that the toys might actually go to the children’s ward at the infirmary.

  ‘You could take them when you go back to work,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Juliette. ‘I suppose I could.’

  By midnight, Ewan’s room had been emptied but for the rocking chair and the little wooden bed. Juliette swept and hoovered and Harrie cleaned the grime from the windows. All that was left to do was remove the name glued to the door and Richard prised off the E, W, A and N with a screwdriver.

  One by one, the three of them came to the end of their individual tasks and went out on to the landing.

  ‘God, I’m ravenous,’ said Juliette. ‘Is it too late to eat?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Harrie. ‘What would you like? I’ll make whatever you want. Just tell me.’

  ‘Anything. Everything.’

  ‘All right,’ said Harrie, heading down to the kitchen. ‘There’ll be something on the table whenever you’re ready.’

  ‘There is some white paint left in the shed, isn’t there, Richard?’ said Juliette.

  ‘I think so, yes,’ he replied.

  ‘I’d like it all white,’ she said, looking into the bare box of the room. ‘Like it used to be.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘We could get it done tomorrow. Me and Harrie.’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘It is,’ said Juliette, and switched off the light. ‘I want it to look like a nursery.’

  Richard imagined her pregnant again, all breasts and belly. Carrying a girl this time. The seed of the family proper.

  Ewan would still be here with them, of course. There would be pho
tographs to show and stories to tell their Linda, Jason, Bobby and Jo as soon as they were old enough to understand that death had been to Starve Acre and that was the way of things sometimes.

  Death came, but it went again.

  And perhaps Juliette had realised at last that she needn’t be so submissive to it any more. There was no reason why they couldn’t make Starve Acre the centre of Willoughby life just as they’d always planned.

  Richard felt the past receding like a tide. The hare had brought the spring. The worst of their grief was over. Perhaps they had survived.

  Part Two

  Although she had gutted Ewan’s room, it was still too soon for Juliette to remove herself completely. She spent the night on the boy’s bed and slept well. Richard too. There had been no shake of his shoulder; no Juliette whispering in his ear about the footsteps she’d heard on the landing or the small voice singing in the garden.

  In the morning she was up before he was and he found her talking to Harrie in what he supposed he now ought to call the nursery again. Part of him flared with the anxiety that she had changed her mind overnight, but the clearance had been so complete that to put everything back now would be an even more arduous task. And what would be the point? The mess could never be perfectly reassembled.

  ‘I’ll go and fetch the brushes,’ said Harrie and went downstairs.

  ‘I suppose we should move the cot back in here,’ Juliette said. ‘I could give it a coat of paint once the walls are done.’

  Richard agreed, happy to let her dictate the pace, and followed her to the master bedroom, where for several years Ewan’s old hand-built crib had been sitting against the wall and waiting to be filled. When they were inside, Juliette put her hand on his shoulder and for a moment he thought she might close the door, turn the key and want to . . . But she went over to the cot and tested its weight.