The Judas Tree, page 6
‘I’m not.’ She leant forward to put her work on the coffee table. ‘I wish you’d talk to me about this, that’s all. I’ve never even heard you mention the name Luke before.’
‘Look, I’m not keeping it from you for any reason. It’s just not important.’ He reached out and grazed his fingers down her cheek then pulled her into him. ‘I’ve told you before, those years at school, none of it matters now. I’ve put it behind me.’
‘Put what behind you? What happened?’
He didn’t answer immediately. She could tell he was thinking about telling her, weighing it up, but then he shook his head. ‘I really don’t want to talk about it. Stuff happened. Stuff that’s too hard to talk about. It’s best forgotten.’
‘But Luke—’
‘Please, Harmony,’ he said, interrupting her. ‘You know better than anyone how little time I spend thinking about school. Seeing him like that threw me. Last time I saw him he was a kid. I was expecting a nice lunch in the sun with Emma and Ian. I just wasn’t expecting it and it winded me.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I probably need to work on my acting skills a bit. Perfect the art of hiding shock. That’s the second time in a week I’ve failed with that.’
She sat back and dropped her eyes, focused on her hands, folded in her lap.
‘I’m going to grab a beer,’ he said. ‘You want anything?’
‘No, thanks.’
She watched him leave the living room then leant back against the arm of the sofa, turning her head to breathe in its smell; safe and familiar, wrapping around her like a warm blanket. She and Will had bought it in the sales on Tottenham Court Road the weekend they moved in together. It was the first piece of furniture they’d bought, and as they left the shop he’d squeezed her hand and whispered, ‘This is it, Harmony. Our beginning. It all starts here.’
The sofa was delivered two weeks later and put beneath the window in the small living room in their first flat in Vauxhall in front of an upturned packing box they used – for five months it turned out – as a coffee table. They sat on it all evening, drinking wine and eating Chinese from the takeaway a few doors down. Later they made love on it, their wine glasses and empty food cartons discarded on the floor, the ancient television – as deep as it was wide – flickering silently in the corner of the darkened room. Those were innocent, happy times, and the hit of nostalgia made her head swim.
Harmony worked for the next few hours. When the words began to swim, her eyes heavy with tiredness, she put the papers down and stood. She gasped a little at the stiff pain in her lower back and cursed herself for not sitting at her desk. She saw her mother wagging a finger at her, telling her off for working slouched on the sofa, and mouthed a silent I know, I know.
Will appeared at the living room door. ‘I’m going to go to bed. You coming?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m shattered. I’ll get a drink and then follow you.’
Harmony filled a glass of water then checked Will had locked the back door. As she did so, she peered through the glazed panel. The garden, which was bathed in the last of the fading light, could have done with their attention this weekend. It was looking neglected and untidy. The garden was pretty much the only reason they’d stayed in the flat, which was dark and poky, with one bedroom, the box room she used as a study, and a living room they squeezed a dining table into. The garden, however, was beautiful and large by London standards, about forty feet by thirty, with a magical feel. It had high brick walls that were carpeted with unruly bottle-green ivy and an area of aged paving, some of the slabs cracked with moss growing between. There were two overgrown flower beds that ran along each of the walls, and at the end of the garden was a stone bench with carved legs behind which was a mature rose bush that seemed to flower for months. It was a hidden gem in the slice of urban grey between Barons Court and West Kensington tube stations. When Harmony found out she was pregnant she knew they’d have to move. Will had been hard to persuade – he loved the flat with a passion – but she persisted, explaining they needed somewhere more suitable for a family, somewhere with a proper bedroom for the baby and a utility room, maybe a playroom too. When she showed the valuing estate agent the garden she had a pang of doubt as his eyes lit up.
‘Oh, this is very special,’ he’d said, purring with excitement. ‘Yes. Lots of potential here. It’ll fly off our books. Not many places with an outside space like this around here.’
After the miscarriage, there was no reason to move, no need to justify the expense – the conveyancing fees alone were enough to make their eyes water – but rather than feel relieved she could stay in her home, she felt trapped, resentful of the flat now inextricably linked to her loss.
Will was reading in bed. She went to shut the curtains.
‘Can you leave them?’ He closed his book and laid it on the bedside table.
She hesitated, her hand resting on the edge of the curtain. She didn’t like sleeping with them open; she felt exposed, worried about people being able to see in.
‘I’d like them open tonight, if you don’t mind?’
She let her hand drop from the curtain and climbed into bed beside him and he turned his bedside light off.
She curled up close to him, resting her head on his shoulder. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ she asked. ‘Everybody around the table today could tell there was something wrong, you know. Did you and Luke fall out at school? Was he the reason you didn’t enjoy it there?’
‘No, we didn’t fall out. We were great friends. I met him towards the end of the first term when we were thirteen. He left though, was expelled actually, and I didn’t hear from him again.’
‘Why was he expelled?’
Will turned his head to stare out of the window. ‘I don’t know.’ His voice was edged with sadness. ‘He shouldn’t have been.’
‘Was it dreadful there?’
He didn’t answer immediately. Then after a few moments he spoke quietly. ‘Not all of it. Most of it was bearable. But, yes, some of it was awful.’
She kissed his chest. ‘I can’t believe your parents sent you away.’ She was unable to keep the blame out of her voice. ‘I don’t know how people do it. I mean, what age were you? Eight? It’s barbaric. Why have children if you’re going to send them away?’
‘Mum didn’t want me to go, though I remember her saying something about it being good to get away from her apron strings. It was my father. He believed it was the right thing to do. He saw it as some sort of rite of passage. Spouted all that nonsense about boarding school turning boys into men.’ He paused briefly. ‘I suppose it was what people did back then.’
‘Not the people I knew.’ She thought of her father-in-law, of his holier-than-thou attitude to life, his favouring of etiquette over emotion, the malice in his voice when he talked about immigrants, the way he buttoned his coat before leaving for church and tutted at Harmony as she sat at the breakfast table reading the Sunday papers, his sneering and sniping at Will, his inability to show any signs of affection towards his only child.
Early on in their relationship, Will told her he had only seen his parents on the last Sunday of each month during term time. They’d drive to a pub on the A30, order three portions of scampi and chips, then he and his father would eat their food as his mother chattered mindlessly to fill the stony silence. It was from the odd anecdote such as this that Harmony began to understand Will’s unwillingness to talk about his childhood and his loathing of school. They’d driven past the place once, years earlier, on their way home from a wedding in Fowey.
Harmony had been studying the map as Will drove.
‘Well, look at that. Tintagel is a real place,’ she suddenly said. ‘Who knew?’
He laughed. ‘You thought it was made up?’
She smiled. ‘I never gave it too much thought. I thought it was all just part of the legend. Ladies in lakes and dashing knights and swords in stones.’
‘Do you want to visit?’ Will cast her a glance.
‘Tintagel?’
He grinned and nodded.
‘But it’s out of the way?’
‘So what? Come on, let’s go. Walk where King Arthur walked. We can book into a crappy B and B with a grumpy landlady. Get out on the cliffs. Have our chips stolen by sea gulls.’
‘What about work?’
‘We’ll call in sick.’
She hesitated. ‘We can’t—’
‘But we can. Come on. It’ll be fun.’
Then she’d nodded, hesitantly at first, then with more vigour. Will’s enthusiasm was infectious. Maybe it would be fun to do something on the spur of the moment for once? ‘Go on, then. Why not?’
They’d been talking and laughing, energised by their impetuous decision, but then Will had fallen quiet. He pulled over and stopped the car. His knuckles were white as he gripped the wheel.
‘What’s wrong?’ Harmony asked.
‘Pendower Hall,’ he breathed.
‘What?’
‘My old school. Back there. We just passed it.’
Harmony turned to look and saw a long grey brick wall, too high to see anything behind it. ‘Can I see it?’ she asked then. ‘Will you show me?’
A look of horror swept over his face. ‘Jesus. Why?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I’d like to see if it’s anything like I imagine. It’ll help me build the picture of you from back then.’
‘That place won’t help you build any picture of me.’
‘Please?’
For a moment he didn’t move, then suddenly, in one quick movement, he threw the car into gear and reversed at speed back to the entrance where two aged stone lions sat bored on pillars either side. They turned up the driveway, long and straight and lined by tall and ancient trees like the bars of a prison, and drove up towards a looming gothic manor.
‘It’s deserted,’ she whispered. A shiver passed through her as she looked up at the windows that punctured the stone like dead, glazed eyes.
‘School holidays.’
They pulled up in front of the pillared entrance and Will turned the engine off. ‘This is where my father handed me over to that cock of a headmaster,’ Will said grimly. ‘I can still remember his fingers digging into my shoulders and him saying to Drysdale, “Well, all I can say is he’s a little bugger. Do what you must.” You should have seen the bastard’s eyes light up. Parental permission to make my life a misery.’ He drew a laboured breath and exhaled heavily. ‘Come on, it’s a fucking shithole. Let’s get out of here.’
That was the last time he spoke about the school.
‘You know,’ Harmony whispered, gently moving his head to face her. ‘If you’d been my child I’d have kept you with me as long as I possibly could. I’d never have sent you away.’
He smiled, his features lit by the gauzy moonlight. ‘Hey, it’s OK. You mustn’t worry about me. It wasn’t great, but I’m fine. It was just school. Children can adapt to everything and we all found our ways to cope at that place. It’s in the past now. Where it belongs.’
Chapter Six
Will couldn’t sleep. He lay still as Harmony mumbled quietly beside him, every now and then letting out a torrent of mutterings. This was something she did – talking in her sleep – yelling out as if in surprise then murmuring unintelligibly, her head moving back and forth emphatically, as if arguing intently with a character in her dreams. She settled and he focused his hearing on the noises outside the flat, the occasional car, a police siren not far away, faint footsteps and muffled talking of a group of people as they walked past the living room window. His mind whirred; he was never going to get to sleep. He eased himself out of bed, careful not to wake Harmony, lifted his clothes off the chair in the corner of the room and crept out of the bedroom. He dressed in the hallway, then took his keys off the hook by the door and slipped outside.
Night-rambling, he called it. Walking at night. It was a habit that started when he was about ten or eleven when, one night, unable to sleep for worrying about going back to school, he’d called for his mother. She had sat on the edge of his bed, patted his hand, and told him, ‘Enough now. Be quiet and count sheep.’ His heart sank as she left the room, closing the door behind her so he was plunged back into darkness. He was pretty sure counting sheep would do nothing to ease the fear which clamped around his heart and stomach and squeezed and squeezed, and he was right. By the time he’d counted a flock of four hundred he was no more sleepy than when he began. It was then, on a whim, that he climbed out of bed, let himself quietly out of the house, and set off on his very first night-ramble. In the years that followed he often found himself creeping downstairs, holding his breath as he stepped over the creakiest floorboards, pausing every few steps to listen for the telltale sounds of adults on the prowl. Back then these nighttime treks would set his pulse racing, send adrenaline pumping into his blood and push his worries into the background. But as he got older the night-rambles became calming, those first deep slugs of night air like Valium.
It was a ramble, or at least the repercussions of one, that first brought him and Luke together. One night in the third week of his first term at Pendower Hall, Will was caught sneaking out by Mr Fielder, a reedy history teacher with a sparse moustache who reeked of coffee and stale cigarettes. Will had eased open the door of the boarding house and walked straight into him. The man sent him back up to the first years’ dormitory, his thin voice laced with what might have been regret as he told young Will he’d be seeing the headmaster the following day. Will’s stomach had churned with dread for the rest of the night and the whole of the following day until, finally, in the evening after prep, Drysdale summoned him.
‘Tell me, English – I’d love to know – exactly why you want to run away from school? Why you’d want to cause us bother? Why you would want to worry your parents? Hm?’
Will’s stuttered mix of ums and ers failed to convince this terrifying man and the caning that followed was brutal. Will limped back to the dormitory bruised and biting back tears, and climbed gingerly into bed. Later, a little while after Matron had turned the lights out and the dorm was still, a boy on the other side of the room – a quiet, small boy whom Will hadn’t taken much notice of – crept across the room. The boy stood motionless by Will’s bed for a moment or two. Then he glanced over his shoulder and thrust out a closed fist. Will didn’t move. Nor did the boy. He stood there, like a statue, his arm held out towards Will. Will furrowed his brow and shrugged, unsure what he was meant to do. The boy sighed theatrically and leant closer.
‘Take it,’ he whispered. ‘It’ll stop the bum-sting.’ Then he grabbed Will’s hand and pushed something hard into it and closed Will’s fingers around whatever it was before silently returning to his bed.
When Will opened his hand and saw what he’d been given his heart missed a beat. Two foil-wrapped toffees lay on his palm like gold coins. Will closed his hand and thrust it beneath his blanket. Sweets weren’t allowed. Sweets would get confiscated by the prefects, stolen and eaten, your things ransacked if there was even the smallest suspicion there was more. Where had this boy hidden his contraband?
Will sat up in his bed and looked over at the boy, Luke, who also sat up. His pale, thin face was lit in the shaft of fluorescent light from the corridor. He stared at Will, solemn and intense, nodded once then lay back down. Will pulled his grey, regulation blanket over his head and waited with bated breath, heart hammering, until the duty prefect had done his final rounds. When Will was sure it was safe, he undid the golden wrappers, coughing to mask any rustling, then popped both toffees in at once, almost too much for his mouth to hold. He sucked slowly, closing his eyes as the creamy sweetness ran down his throat. Luke was right; for a few glorious minutes his throbbing backside, the desperate homesickness, the injustice and loneliness, was all forgotten.
In the morning, as they walked down the stairs on their way to breakfast, Will caught up with Luke.
‘Thanks,’ he whispered.
Luke grinned and his face lit up like a flare.
Will walked along the deserted back streets of Fulham. His stride was full and his rhythmic footsteps rang on the pavement. The houses he passed were dark, lights off, curtains drawn, their front doors locked and security chains slid across. He imagined the people who lived in them tucked up in their beds, quietly snoring, sleeping deeply. He heard the startled screech of a cat or maybe a fox and picked up his pace. He allowed his thoughts to settle on the last time he’d seen Luke – the day he was expelled – both of them perched on those hard wooden chairs in Drysdale’s office, which stank of old leather, wood polish, and mothballs. He remembered the look in Luke’s eyes. The way they’d welled with tears that spilled down his cheeks … Thick nausea pooled in the pit of his stomach as he strode onwards.
In the morning, Will left their flat and headed up towards the North End Road, weaving in and out of the people on the busy pavements as he walked to the shop.
‘Morning, Frank,’ he said, as he pushed through the door to the happy tinkle of the old-fashioned bell that hung on the back.
‘Morning, William,’ Frank replied brightly.
Will was fond of Frank. He’d known him for years. Frank had worked at the wine merchant’s Will got a job at when he finished college. When his father died, leaving Will a small lump sum, he decided to open his own shop and asked Frank to work for him. He was delighted when Frank said yes; he was great company, eccentric in a very British way, with a great sense of humour and an easy-going nature. Frank was a short man, and a little rotund, and always dressed in well-fitting suits with his grey hair slicked back with hair cream that he ordered from a specialist gentleman’s shop in Bristol. He lived in Chiswick with two Persian cats called Pie, short for Pork Pie, and Pinwheel and his husband, a writer of moderately successful science fiction, who was as wiry as Frank was portly. Frank loved wine with a passion, and was a walking encyclopaedia when it came to claret and burgundy, but tended to struggle with other types. His cheerful demeanour brought warmth to North End Wines, which nestled in a tired row of shops between the Co-op and a bookmaker’s. From the outside the shop didn’t look like much, with its chipped maroon paintwork, dirty white walls and security bars on the windows – a legacy from its days as a sex shop – but the rent was cheap. Inside, however, was an Aladdin’s cave of beautiful wine. Bottles were shelved from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, all of them carefully selected by Will from a variety of vineyards, large and small, and already, even after only a year of trading, they had a small but loyal customer base who travelled from various corners of London and beyond, battling gridlock to buy their wine.
‘Look, I’m not keeping it from you for any reason. It’s just not important.’ He reached out and grazed his fingers down her cheek then pulled her into him. ‘I’ve told you before, those years at school, none of it matters now. I’ve put it behind me.’
‘Put what behind you? What happened?’
He didn’t answer immediately. She could tell he was thinking about telling her, weighing it up, but then he shook his head. ‘I really don’t want to talk about it. Stuff happened. Stuff that’s too hard to talk about. It’s best forgotten.’
‘But Luke—’
‘Please, Harmony,’ he said, interrupting her. ‘You know better than anyone how little time I spend thinking about school. Seeing him like that threw me. Last time I saw him he was a kid. I was expecting a nice lunch in the sun with Emma and Ian. I just wasn’t expecting it and it winded me.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I probably need to work on my acting skills a bit. Perfect the art of hiding shock. That’s the second time in a week I’ve failed with that.’
She sat back and dropped her eyes, focused on her hands, folded in her lap.
‘I’m going to grab a beer,’ he said. ‘You want anything?’
‘No, thanks.’
She watched him leave the living room then leant back against the arm of the sofa, turning her head to breathe in its smell; safe and familiar, wrapping around her like a warm blanket. She and Will had bought it in the sales on Tottenham Court Road the weekend they moved in together. It was the first piece of furniture they’d bought, and as they left the shop he’d squeezed her hand and whispered, ‘This is it, Harmony. Our beginning. It all starts here.’
The sofa was delivered two weeks later and put beneath the window in the small living room in their first flat in Vauxhall in front of an upturned packing box they used – for five months it turned out – as a coffee table. They sat on it all evening, drinking wine and eating Chinese from the takeaway a few doors down. Later they made love on it, their wine glasses and empty food cartons discarded on the floor, the ancient television – as deep as it was wide – flickering silently in the corner of the darkened room. Those were innocent, happy times, and the hit of nostalgia made her head swim.
Harmony worked for the next few hours. When the words began to swim, her eyes heavy with tiredness, she put the papers down and stood. She gasped a little at the stiff pain in her lower back and cursed herself for not sitting at her desk. She saw her mother wagging a finger at her, telling her off for working slouched on the sofa, and mouthed a silent I know, I know.
Will appeared at the living room door. ‘I’m going to go to bed. You coming?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m shattered. I’ll get a drink and then follow you.’
Harmony filled a glass of water then checked Will had locked the back door. As she did so, she peered through the glazed panel. The garden, which was bathed in the last of the fading light, could have done with their attention this weekend. It was looking neglected and untidy. The garden was pretty much the only reason they’d stayed in the flat, which was dark and poky, with one bedroom, the box room she used as a study, and a living room they squeezed a dining table into. The garden, however, was beautiful and large by London standards, about forty feet by thirty, with a magical feel. It had high brick walls that were carpeted with unruly bottle-green ivy and an area of aged paving, some of the slabs cracked with moss growing between. There were two overgrown flower beds that ran along each of the walls, and at the end of the garden was a stone bench with carved legs behind which was a mature rose bush that seemed to flower for months. It was a hidden gem in the slice of urban grey between Barons Court and West Kensington tube stations. When Harmony found out she was pregnant she knew they’d have to move. Will had been hard to persuade – he loved the flat with a passion – but she persisted, explaining they needed somewhere more suitable for a family, somewhere with a proper bedroom for the baby and a utility room, maybe a playroom too. When she showed the valuing estate agent the garden she had a pang of doubt as his eyes lit up.
‘Oh, this is very special,’ he’d said, purring with excitement. ‘Yes. Lots of potential here. It’ll fly off our books. Not many places with an outside space like this around here.’
After the miscarriage, there was no reason to move, no need to justify the expense – the conveyancing fees alone were enough to make their eyes water – but rather than feel relieved she could stay in her home, she felt trapped, resentful of the flat now inextricably linked to her loss.
Will was reading in bed. She went to shut the curtains.
‘Can you leave them?’ He closed his book and laid it on the bedside table.
She hesitated, her hand resting on the edge of the curtain. She didn’t like sleeping with them open; she felt exposed, worried about people being able to see in.
‘I’d like them open tonight, if you don’t mind?’
She let her hand drop from the curtain and climbed into bed beside him and he turned his bedside light off.
She curled up close to him, resting her head on his shoulder. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ she asked. ‘Everybody around the table today could tell there was something wrong, you know. Did you and Luke fall out at school? Was he the reason you didn’t enjoy it there?’
‘No, we didn’t fall out. We were great friends. I met him towards the end of the first term when we were thirteen. He left though, was expelled actually, and I didn’t hear from him again.’
‘Why was he expelled?’
Will turned his head to stare out of the window. ‘I don’t know.’ His voice was edged with sadness. ‘He shouldn’t have been.’
‘Was it dreadful there?’
He didn’t answer immediately. Then after a few moments he spoke quietly. ‘Not all of it. Most of it was bearable. But, yes, some of it was awful.’
She kissed his chest. ‘I can’t believe your parents sent you away.’ She was unable to keep the blame out of her voice. ‘I don’t know how people do it. I mean, what age were you? Eight? It’s barbaric. Why have children if you’re going to send them away?’
‘Mum didn’t want me to go, though I remember her saying something about it being good to get away from her apron strings. It was my father. He believed it was the right thing to do. He saw it as some sort of rite of passage. Spouted all that nonsense about boarding school turning boys into men.’ He paused briefly. ‘I suppose it was what people did back then.’
‘Not the people I knew.’ She thought of her father-in-law, of his holier-than-thou attitude to life, his favouring of etiquette over emotion, the malice in his voice when he talked about immigrants, the way he buttoned his coat before leaving for church and tutted at Harmony as she sat at the breakfast table reading the Sunday papers, his sneering and sniping at Will, his inability to show any signs of affection towards his only child.
Early on in their relationship, Will told her he had only seen his parents on the last Sunday of each month during term time. They’d drive to a pub on the A30, order three portions of scampi and chips, then he and his father would eat their food as his mother chattered mindlessly to fill the stony silence. It was from the odd anecdote such as this that Harmony began to understand Will’s unwillingness to talk about his childhood and his loathing of school. They’d driven past the place once, years earlier, on their way home from a wedding in Fowey.
Harmony had been studying the map as Will drove.
‘Well, look at that. Tintagel is a real place,’ she suddenly said. ‘Who knew?’
He laughed. ‘You thought it was made up?’
She smiled. ‘I never gave it too much thought. I thought it was all just part of the legend. Ladies in lakes and dashing knights and swords in stones.’
‘Do you want to visit?’ Will cast her a glance.
‘Tintagel?’
He grinned and nodded.
‘But it’s out of the way?’
‘So what? Come on, let’s go. Walk where King Arthur walked. We can book into a crappy B and B with a grumpy landlady. Get out on the cliffs. Have our chips stolen by sea gulls.’
‘What about work?’
‘We’ll call in sick.’
She hesitated. ‘We can’t—’
‘But we can. Come on. It’ll be fun.’
Then she’d nodded, hesitantly at first, then with more vigour. Will’s enthusiasm was infectious. Maybe it would be fun to do something on the spur of the moment for once? ‘Go on, then. Why not?’
They’d been talking and laughing, energised by their impetuous decision, but then Will had fallen quiet. He pulled over and stopped the car. His knuckles were white as he gripped the wheel.
‘What’s wrong?’ Harmony asked.
‘Pendower Hall,’ he breathed.
‘What?’
‘My old school. Back there. We just passed it.’
Harmony turned to look and saw a long grey brick wall, too high to see anything behind it. ‘Can I see it?’ she asked then. ‘Will you show me?’
A look of horror swept over his face. ‘Jesus. Why?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I’d like to see if it’s anything like I imagine. It’ll help me build the picture of you from back then.’
‘That place won’t help you build any picture of me.’
‘Please?’
For a moment he didn’t move, then suddenly, in one quick movement, he threw the car into gear and reversed at speed back to the entrance where two aged stone lions sat bored on pillars either side. They turned up the driveway, long and straight and lined by tall and ancient trees like the bars of a prison, and drove up towards a looming gothic manor.
‘It’s deserted,’ she whispered. A shiver passed through her as she looked up at the windows that punctured the stone like dead, glazed eyes.
‘School holidays.’
They pulled up in front of the pillared entrance and Will turned the engine off. ‘This is where my father handed me over to that cock of a headmaster,’ Will said grimly. ‘I can still remember his fingers digging into my shoulders and him saying to Drysdale, “Well, all I can say is he’s a little bugger. Do what you must.” You should have seen the bastard’s eyes light up. Parental permission to make my life a misery.’ He drew a laboured breath and exhaled heavily. ‘Come on, it’s a fucking shithole. Let’s get out of here.’
That was the last time he spoke about the school.
‘You know,’ Harmony whispered, gently moving his head to face her. ‘If you’d been my child I’d have kept you with me as long as I possibly could. I’d never have sent you away.’
He smiled, his features lit by the gauzy moonlight. ‘Hey, it’s OK. You mustn’t worry about me. It wasn’t great, but I’m fine. It was just school. Children can adapt to everything and we all found our ways to cope at that place. It’s in the past now. Where it belongs.’
Chapter Six
Will couldn’t sleep. He lay still as Harmony mumbled quietly beside him, every now and then letting out a torrent of mutterings. This was something she did – talking in her sleep – yelling out as if in surprise then murmuring unintelligibly, her head moving back and forth emphatically, as if arguing intently with a character in her dreams. She settled and he focused his hearing on the noises outside the flat, the occasional car, a police siren not far away, faint footsteps and muffled talking of a group of people as they walked past the living room window. His mind whirred; he was never going to get to sleep. He eased himself out of bed, careful not to wake Harmony, lifted his clothes off the chair in the corner of the room and crept out of the bedroom. He dressed in the hallway, then took his keys off the hook by the door and slipped outside.
Night-rambling, he called it. Walking at night. It was a habit that started when he was about ten or eleven when, one night, unable to sleep for worrying about going back to school, he’d called for his mother. She had sat on the edge of his bed, patted his hand, and told him, ‘Enough now. Be quiet and count sheep.’ His heart sank as she left the room, closing the door behind her so he was plunged back into darkness. He was pretty sure counting sheep would do nothing to ease the fear which clamped around his heart and stomach and squeezed and squeezed, and he was right. By the time he’d counted a flock of four hundred he was no more sleepy than when he began. It was then, on a whim, that he climbed out of bed, let himself quietly out of the house, and set off on his very first night-ramble. In the years that followed he often found himself creeping downstairs, holding his breath as he stepped over the creakiest floorboards, pausing every few steps to listen for the telltale sounds of adults on the prowl. Back then these nighttime treks would set his pulse racing, send adrenaline pumping into his blood and push his worries into the background. But as he got older the night-rambles became calming, those first deep slugs of night air like Valium.
It was a ramble, or at least the repercussions of one, that first brought him and Luke together. One night in the third week of his first term at Pendower Hall, Will was caught sneaking out by Mr Fielder, a reedy history teacher with a sparse moustache who reeked of coffee and stale cigarettes. Will had eased open the door of the boarding house and walked straight into him. The man sent him back up to the first years’ dormitory, his thin voice laced with what might have been regret as he told young Will he’d be seeing the headmaster the following day. Will’s stomach had churned with dread for the rest of the night and the whole of the following day until, finally, in the evening after prep, Drysdale summoned him.
‘Tell me, English – I’d love to know – exactly why you want to run away from school? Why you’d want to cause us bother? Why you would want to worry your parents? Hm?’
Will’s stuttered mix of ums and ers failed to convince this terrifying man and the caning that followed was brutal. Will limped back to the dormitory bruised and biting back tears, and climbed gingerly into bed. Later, a little while after Matron had turned the lights out and the dorm was still, a boy on the other side of the room – a quiet, small boy whom Will hadn’t taken much notice of – crept across the room. The boy stood motionless by Will’s bed for a moment or two. Then he glanced over his shoulder and thrust out a closed fist. Will didn’t move. Nor did the boy. He stood there, like a statue, his arm held out towards Will. Will furrowed his brow and shrugged, unsure what he was meant to do. The boy sighed theatrically and leant closer.
‘Take it,’ he whispered. ‘It’ll stop the bum-sting.’ Then he grabbed Will’s hand and pushed something hard into it and closed Will’s fingers around whatever it was before silently returning to his bed.
When Will opened his hand and saw what he’d been given his heart missed a beat. Two foil-wrapped toffees lay on his palm like gold coins. Will closed his hand and thrust it beneath his blanket. Sweets weren’t allowed. Sweets would get confiscated by the prefects, stolen and eaten, your things ransacked if there was even the smallest suspicion there was more. Where had this boy hidden his contraband?
Will sat up in his bed and looked over at the boy, Luke, who also sat up. His pale, thin face was lit in the shaft of fluorescent light from the corridor. He stared at Will, solemn and intense, nodded once then lay back down. Will pulled his grey, regulation blanket over his head and waited with bated breath, heart hammering, until the duty prefect had done his final rounds. When Will was sure it was safe, he undid the golden wrappers, coughing to mask any rustling, then popped both toffees in at once, almost too much for his mouth to hold. He sucked slowly, closing his eyes as the creamy sweetness ran down his throat. Luke was right; for a few glorious minutes his throbbing backside, the desperate homesickness, the injustice and loneliness, was all forgotten.
In the morning, as they walked down the stairs on their way to breakfast, Will caught up with Luke.
‘Thanks,’ he whispered.
Luke grinned and his face lit up like a flare.
Will walked along the deserted back streets of Fulham. His stride was full and his rhythmic footsteps rang on the pavement. The houses he passed were dark, lights off, curtains drawn, their front doors locked and security chains slid across. He imagined the people who lived in them tucked up in their beds, quietly snoring, sleeping deeply. He heard the startled screech of a cat or maybe a fox and picked up his pace. He allowed his thoughts to settle on the last time he’d seen Luke – the day he was expelled – both of them perched on those hard wooden chairs in Drysdale’s office, which stank of old leather, wood polish, and mothballs. He remembered the look in Luke’s eyes. The way they’d welled with tears that spilled down his cheeks … Thick nausea pooled in the pit of his stomach as he strode onwards.
In the morning, Will left their flat and headed up towards the North End Road, weaving in and out of the people on the busy pavements as he walked to the shop.
‘Morning, Frank,’ he said, as he pushed through the door to the happy tinkle of the old-fashioned bell that hung on the back.
‘Morning, William,’ Frank replied brightly.
Will was fond of Frank. He’d known him for years. Frank had worked at the wine merchant’s Will got a job at when he finished college. When his father died, leaving Will a small lump sum, he decided to open his own shop and asked Frank to work for him. He was delighted when Frank said yes; he was great company, eccentric in a very British way, with a great sense of humour and an easy-going nature. Frank was a short man, and a little rotund, and always dressed in well-fitting suits with his grey hair slicked back with hair cream that he ordered from a specialist gentleman’s shop in Bristol. He lived in Chiswick with two Persian cats called Pie, short for Pork Pie, and Pinwheel and his husband, a writer of moderately successful science fiction, who was as wiry as Frank was portly. Frank loved wine with a passion, and was a walking encyclopaedia when it came to claret and burgundy, but tended to struggle with other types. His cheerful demeanour brought warmth to North End Wines, which nestled in a tired row of shops between the Co-op and a bookmaker’s. From the outside the shop didn’t look like much, with its chipped maroon paintwork, dirty white walls and security bars on the windows – a legacy from its days as a sex shop – but the rent was cheap. Inside, however, was an Aladdin’s cave of beautiful wine. Bottles were shelved from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, all of them carefully selected by Will from a variety of vineyards, large and small, and already, even after only a year of trading, they had a small but loyal customer base who travelled from various corners of London and beyond, battling gridlock to buy their wine.
