across the fields – must be less than half an hour’s walk away. He could leave his case here, safely hidden in the roadside bushes, and take only his bag. For some reason – inside the bottles joltered and chuckled – he felt reluctant to leave the duffel bag. But the house drew him. Ridiculous, he told himself. He had already seen that the house was uninhabitable, at least for the moment.
Looked uninhabitable
, he amended, recalling Pog Hill Lane, the derelict gardens and boarded-up windows and the secret, gleeful life behind. What if, maybe, just behind the door …
Funny how his mind kept returning to that thought. There was no logic in it and yet it was slyly persuasive. That abandoned vegetable patch, the scrap of red flannel, that feeling, that certainty, that there really was someone
inside
the house.
Inside the duffel bag the carnival had begun again. Catcalls, laughter, distant fanfare. It sounded like coming home. Even I could feel it – I, grown in vineyards far from here, in Burgundy, where the air is brighter and the earth richer, kinder. It was the sound of home fires and doors opening and the smell of bread baking and clean sheets and warm, friendly unwashed bodies. Jay felt it, too, but assumed it came from the house; almost without thinking he took another step towards the darkened building. It would not hurt to have another look, he told himself. Just to be sure.
18
Pog Hill, Summer 1977
SEPTEMBER CAME. JAY WENT BACK TO SCHOOL WITH A SENSE OF finality, a feeling that something at Pog Hill had changed. If it had, then Joe’s short, infrequent letters gave no sign. There was a card at Christmas – two lines, carefully inscribed with the round printing of the barely literate – then another at Easter. The terms crawled to an end as usual. Jay’s fifteenth birthday came and went – a cricket bat from his father and Candide, theatre tickets from his mother. After that came exams; dorm parties; secrets told and promises broken; a couple of hot-weather fights; a school play,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, with all the parts played by boys, as in Shakespeare’s time. Jay played Puck, much to the chagrin of the Bread Baron, but all the time he was thinking of Joe and Pog Hill, and as the end of the summer term approached, he grew jumpy and irritable and impatient. This year his mother had decided to join him in Kirby Monckton for a few weeks, ostensibly to spend more time with her son, but in reality to escape the media attention following her most recent amorous break-up. Jay wasn’t looking forward to being the focus of her sudden maternal interest, and said so clearly enough to provoke an outburst of outraged histrionics. He was in disgrace before the holidays had even started.
They arrived in late June, by taxi, in the rain. Jay’s mother was doing her
Mater Dolorosa
act, and he was trying to listen to the radio as she passed between long, soulful silences and girlish exclamations on seeing forgotten landmarks.
‘Jay, darling, look! That little church – isn’t it just the
sweetest
?’ He put it down to her being in so many sitcoms, but maybe she had always talked like that. Jay turned the radio up a fraction. The Eagles were playing ‘Hotel California’. She gave him one of her pained looks and thinned her mouth. Jay ignored her.
The rain came down non-stop for the first week of the holiday. Jay stayed in the house and watched it and listened to the radio, trying to tell himself it couldn’t last for ever. The sky was white and portentous. Looking up into the clouds, the falling raindrops looked like soot. His grandparents fussed over both of them, treating his mother like the little girl she had been, cooking all her favourite meals. For five days they lived on apple pie, ice cream, fried fish and scollops. On the sixth day Jay took his bike down to Pog Hill, in spite of the weather, but Joe’s door was locked and there was no answer to his knocking. Jay left his bike by the back
Looked uninhabitable
, he amended, recalling Pog Hill Lane, the derelict gardens and boarded-up windows and the secret, gleeful life behind. What if, maybe, just behind the door …
Funny how his mind kept returning to that thought. There was no logic in it and yet it was slyly persuasive. That abandoned vegetable patch, the scrap of red flannel, that feeling, that certainty, that there really was someone
inside
the house.
Inside the duffel bag the carnival had begun again. Catcalls, laughter, distant fanfare. It sounded like coming home. Even I could feel it – I, grown in vineyards far from here, in Burgundy, where the air is brighter and the earth richer, kinder. It was the sound of home fires and doors opening and the smell of bread baking and clean sheets and warm, friendly unwashed bodies. Jay felt it, too, but assumed it came from the house; almost without thinking he took another step towards the darkened building. It would not hurt to have another look, he told himself. Just to be sure.
18
Pog Hill, Summer 1977
SEPTEMBER CAME. JAY WENT BACK TO SCHOOL WITH A SENSE OF finality, a feeling that something at Pog Hill had changed. If it had, then Joe’s short, infrequent letters gave no sign. There was a card at Christmas – two lines, carefully inscribed with the round printing of the barely literate – then another at Easter. The terms crawled to an end as usual. Jay’s fifteenth birthday came and went – a cricket bat from his father and Candide, theatre tickets from his mother. After that came exams; dorm parties; secrets told and promises broken; a couple of hot-weather fights; a school play,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, with all the parts played by boys, as in Shakespeare’s time. Jay played Puck, much to the chagrin of the Bread Baron, but all the time he was thinking of Joe and Pog Hill, and as the end of the summer term approached, he grew jumpy and irritable and impatient. This year his mother had decided to join him in Kirby Monckton for a few weeks, ostensibly to spend more time with her son, but in reality to escape the media attention following her most recent amorous break-up. Jay wasn’t looking forward to being the focus of her sudden maternal interest, and said so clearly enough to provoke an outburst of outraged histrionics. He was in disgrace before the holidays had even started.
They arrived in late June, by taxi, in the rain. Jay’s mother was doing her
Mater Dolorosa
act, and he was trying to listen to the radio as she passed between long, soulful silences and girlish exclamations on seeing forgotten landmarks.
‘Jay, darling, look! That little church – isn’t it just the
sweetest
?’ He put it down to her being in so many sitcoms, but maybe she had always talked like that. Jay turned the radio up a fraction. The Eagles were playing ‘Hotel California’. She gave him one of her pained looks and thinned her mouth. Jay ignored her.
The rain came down non-stop for the first week of the holiday. Jay stayed in the house and watched it and listened to the radio, trying to tell himself it couldn’t last for ever. The sky was white and portentous. Looking up into the clouds, the falling raindrops looked like soot. His grandparents fussed over both of them, treating his mother like the little girl she had been, cooking all her favourite meals. For five days they lived on apple pie, ice cream, fried fish and scollops. On the sixth day Jay took his bike down to Pog Hill, in spite of the weather, but Joe’s door was locked and there was no answer to his knocking. Jay left his bike by the back
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