He was a tall, dark haired boy of eleven, had the same shape and colour eyes as his mother, though lacking their clarity. His features were similar, slightly darker, and his presence seemed more poised and careful regarding the different worlds he moved in, as if much of Pat’s one-time and far-off assurance had passed early to him — though the seeds of something like her present conflict and uncertainty loomed in his eyes. ‘I was looking out of the window all the way,’ he said, ‘watching things. Then in Nottingham I had a pie and some coffee.’ He glanced up.
‘I want you to meet Frank,’ she said. ‘He’s living with mummy now.’
‘Hello,’ Kevin said, not, as Frank observed, batting an eyelid. They walked out to the car. Frank fastened his case on the luggage rack. Pat embraced her son again. ‘Don’t you think he’s handsome?’ Frank agreed, but wondered why the boy wasn’t shy of so much fuss. He sorted out the various combinations regarding their journey back. Should Pat drive and the boy sit in front with her? Or should he take the wheel, and the two of them sit together in the back? What about her driving, and Frank sitting beside her, with the boy behind? Which would be best for the wellbeing of their time together? They couldn’t all sit in the front, and that was a fact — which was the worst of these mini cars. He laughed, to find himself blessed with so much consideration, only to wonder what the hell it mattered. Well, things do matter, he decided, pulling forward the front seat so that Pat and Kevin could get behind. But halfway to the village Kevin had to sit in front because he felt car sick.
For the first days he was taciturn, studious, and went only once to visit Waller’s farm. Frank talked to him, spellbound him with facts and possibilities of the various machines he’d worked, discussed motor cars, and natural history which he had taken an interest in through Pat’s books and on his walks.
The sensual monotony of their existence was broken. Kevin sat at the table for meals, and when he wasn’t telling his mother about school he either ate silently, or looked at a book while slowly dealing with food on his plate. Pat didn’t mind him reading at meals, and on this point Frank wondered whether she was spoiling him, or allowing so much freedom simply because it was good for her. Frank had the sense to treat him as another man which, in intellect if not experience, he often seemed to be. ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Pat said, after Kevin had gone to bed. ‘Before, I think he used to be lonely, with me out on my calls so much of the time.’
‘He seems a good lad,’ he remarked. ‘I can’t make much of him, but then, you never can at that age.’
‘I often don’t like the idea of him being bandied about from one part of the country to another, yet it’s best, as things are, that he’s away at school.’ Seeing how she treated him at home, he realized that she must have worried about him a great deal when he wasn’t there, though she had kept it well concealed during the long autumn weeks.
On his ramblings he had noticed a small plantation of firs in an isolated hump of land beyond Panton Hall — trees that were part of the estate. He set out with a trowel, circled and undermined the roots until the slender trunk sloped into his arms and he could pull it clear. Steering a return course through the backbone of the night, head bent and breathing evenly under the coarse weight of the tree, he felt happy at having made off with a piece of greenery that had sprouted from the earth, land which he considered belonged to him, but was denied by circumstances or sham legislation. He felt nothing like a thief except in the caution of his getaway, and hoped the tree would be missed in the morning — likely, since he’d all but trodden a fence down to get at it. As for being tracked, he’d walked the half mile of a nearby road, and turned across fields from there. Low cloud held back stars and moon, and no one else was out on the broad earth. The frost had broken, loam softening underfoot, a smell of soil and bracken cutting his nostrils as he breached a hedge. It seemed as if the year had doubled on its heels to bring autumn back.
He sat down to smoke in the Lincolnshire blackness, his tree a piece of plunder towards which freedom had led him. The roots of it smelled of sap and stored-up frost, comforting soil and crushed fir-needles, the fruitful odours of a life snapped out of its accustomed earth and rut. He thought of Nancy and the children, not with shame or anguish, simply saw them for a moment in front of his eyes. Memories made him uneasy, helped him over the long stretches of field bearing his tree, but he wanted to be further away from them, felt as if tied by the ankle and barely hovering beyond the darkness of their confines — whereas a thousand miles might make him feel as if the whole complex recollection had been worth abandoning.
They were surprised to see him pulling the tree through the back door. ‘Here’s a good-looking conifer for the Christmas pot.’
‘What a robust specimen,’ Kevin exclaimed. Pat came in from cleaning the kitchen, and asked with a cold glance: ‘Where did you get it?’
He weighed up her disapproval, and said for Kevin’s sake: ‘Panton village. I met a man in a pub last week and told him to put one by for me. I paid ten bob for it. Cost a pound in Lincoln.’
He trimmed it, and Kevin helped him gather soil and fix it in a large earthen pot — which they stood in a corner of the dining-room because Pat hinted strongly that it would spoil the furnished perfection of the lounge.
When Kevin was in bed she demanded: ‘Well, where did you get it?’
‘I dug it up. You don’t think I’d buy a thing like this when there are so many around?’
‘No, I don’t. But don’t bring anything else that’s stolen into this house. And don’t tell Kevin where you got it. Not that he doesn’t suspect already.’
The tree framed him, two trees, his own foliage gone deep within. She would certainly never see it, only the mirror of his grey eyes beating back her inquisition. It was the sort of strength she hated in a man, features as if they had been set for generations, fixed like stone that had somehow learned to move. ‘Kevin’s got a head on his shoulders,’ he said, amused that she should control her anger and not come right out with it.
‘It’s a good job he has, otherwise he might mention the tree to someone who’ll hear that one is missing from Panton Hall — to Waller, for example. You still have your city ways: they only have to miss a pound of apples around here and it’s the talk for weeks. Next time, have a head on your shoulders and don’t rely on Kevin having one. I want him to be honest, as well as intelligent.’
How could you argue with a woman who was worrying about her kid? Especially when he’d tried to do them a favour. There was no love for him that night.
But on other nights during the holiday their love was more silently rapturous. Her son was in the room across the landing, and this was all he could put it down to. She folded Frank with her warm arms and slender legs, slept naked with him, in spite of the winter, which she had not done before. Her face changed for love in the moments before the light went out, softened in the frame of her outspread reddening hair. He kissed her lips, and flower-blue eyes that wouldn’t close until he touched the light switch. The strong love, the unique tenderness felt when looking at her, compounded itself when he thought back to her anger, seeing how his love had drawn her out of it, and even without him knowing had transformed them both. They had to be quieter with someone else in the house, and maybe this gave their love that slow-motion, secretive bitter-sweet ritual under quilt and blankets that sent through them such all-flooding passion. Unable to cry out with pleasure they bore it within themselves, touched by its sensual echoes long after the first violent spasms, until they were still and separated, pulled down by some irresistible force into an enclosed boat of sleep and left to drift in a black and dreamless sea.