Out of Time (13 page)

‘We brought it down a few days ago. But you’ll have to practise on softer woods, yellow pine or lime.’

It was the first of many evenings. Randolph showed Joe, an avid pupil, the quality of different woods, sycamore, rosewood, walnut, the way their grain ran, their advantages and drawbacks. Soon Joe could tell from the feel alone which wood he was touching and could, like an insect, identify them by their pungent aroma. He wondered why women used perfume made from flowers instead of trees. He could imagine nothing more alluring.

‘These tools are very old, aren’t they?’

‘Been around for generations.’

Perhaps they had been used to carve the mantelpiece in the long room. Joe handled them with awe.

Life resumed its normal pattern, the fateful inquisition apparently forgotten. Although no further explanations were forthcoming the general attitude was amicable. Joe had no wish to revive memories of the interrogation, nor did he want to dwell on the community’s previous alignment against him. It made him feel the outcast that he knew he was. Unanswered questions remained but Joe had come to understand that the community took the view that events would follow their course. They knew the wisdom of not forcing issues, gathering themselves before the next leap. He would one day have to explain the inexplicable and they would have to declare themselves; but it could wait.

The days were short. A blackout was observed. Shutters were put in position at dusk, lights doused as soon as meals were over, no lamps to light the way to bed. Joe learned the sound and feel of every room, every corridor, every turn in the stairs. The house acquired a new familiarity.

He was aware of other, more significant changes; the relationship between Kathryn and himself.

She had watched over him night and day while he was still unconscious, and most days while he recovered. He resisted her presence by not talking to her. She reciprocated by concentrating silently on tasks that she could do by hand, making clothes, mending, repairing. Yet, despite their unwillingness to communicate, an indefinable intimacy grew between them. It was as though, merely by being there, Kathryn released some of her privacy and drew Joe into her orbit. He sensed, beneath her calm exterior, an emotional vortex as heady as his own. He found it increasingly difficult to resist.

They sought each other out, working together as often as they could though it was Belinda who taught Joe to weave, dye and sew. Kathryn would come in and see them, heads bent over work, laughing together and Joe would find himself comparing the two girls. Belinda was pretty, entertaining, feminine, alluring in her own way. Katherine made no such concessions. Her personal magnetism was strong, her enigmatic manner attractive. Joe was surprised that this attribute had escaped him for so long.

He noticed a thousand details about Kathryn, how she walked with a spring in her step, head erect, her fair hair bouncing on her back, the unusual colour of her green-blue eyes, how they shone when she laughed. He noticed her trim figure, her high rounded breasts, her small capable hands, magically soft and pliant. He noticed her and she, he knew very well, noticed him. Life acquired a new dimension and it was wholly pleasurable.

Some days they did not see one another from dawn to dusk. This should have been of scant significance but Joe minded, minded not being near her, minded not hearing her laugh, missed her sparky rejoinders, the sense of exhilaration she gave him, a heightening of perception when they were together that excited, even exalted him.

Early one morning while it was still dark, knowing she was on guard duty, he stole downstairs. Otto was in the kitchen.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked

‘Up the hill to meet Kathryn.’

Otto nodded and Joe sensed, not disapproval but unease. He wondered at it for the others, if they had noticed his and Kathryn’s burgeoning relationship, had made no comment even by implication.

He reached the foot of the pine and heard her climbing down.

‘Hi! What are you doing here?’

‘Thought I’d bring you some bread and something to drink.’

They sat together on the guard duty blanket and watched the sun rising over the hills, an unusual hard clarity illuminating every stone, every bush, every plant. It took Joe’s breath away and sent a tremor down his spine. Kathryn looked at him as though he had called.

One winter at home, while he was still at primary school, when a nearby lake had frozen, the town had come out, wrapped in gloves and scarves, cheeks red from the cold, like hers were now, to slide and skate. He, Martin and some friends had arranged to meet at midnight and, to the sounds of long forgotten tunes, had skated on a frozen pond. He could hear the absurd waltzes now.

He wanted to tell her, so vivid was it.

She turned to him.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

How could he answer? They had no past in common, no connecting link, no mutual reference points. An unbridgeable gulf lay between them.

‘I love you,’ he said.

He was trembling and he could feel the blood rushing to his face. The words had come unbidden, they had said themselves, had revealed a mine of emotion that had been concealed. He experienced a moment of pure and exquisite joy.

Kathryn took his hand and with her eyes acknowledged what she had not dared declare.

He’s said it now. ‘I love you.’ Did I want him to? I don’t know. All those long hours I sat by his side his presence grew into me, his strangeness, his otherness. I have never met anyone like Joe, a bewildered animal that has lost its way and cannot find its tracks yet with an odd strength which, once emerged from the thicket of his bewilderment, could be formidable.

I watched his face lying on the pillow, his eyelids fluttering as he dreamed, his slender hands resting at his side. Joe is beautiful.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I knew I loved him. It stole on me and took over my heart. But my mind remains clear. This is a love that is impossible.

He longed to take her in his arms but her look, complex and frightening, made him draw back. And he was glad for he needed time to explore his feelings, needed to understand the seismic change that was taking place, he needed to absorb the complex vistas it revealed.

They walked back on the hard frosty ground, not touching though Joe felt her burning presence at his side. As they approached the house she turned to him and lightly brushed his cheeks with her lips.

Inside, Otto looked at them briefly. Later Randolph came in.

‘You realise what’s happening?’

‘Yes.’

‘We have to stop them, before it’s too late.’

‘It already is,’ Otto said.

Joe could not catch up with his feelings, his intellect unable to absorb what his joyful heart told him. Since uttering the three magic words, ‘I love you,’ he found himself inhabiting an enchanted world, a place where every particle, every blade reflected joy unbounded. He spoke to the trees, to the sky ecstatically of his love, he spread it across the universe, shouted it into the ether; this was to be alive, this was the elixir, the glorious zenith of existence. And from its height he perceived, as though a gauze curtain had been lifted, Otto, Randolph, Meredith, Belinda, with new lucidity. He saw them without awe, without fear, he ached to reach out and touch them and say, ‘Whatever is the mystery of your lives, the secret heart of your existence, I am a part of it, a brother in your plight.’

A perverse fate, or was it a deliberate pause, a still moment before passion overwhelmed them, kept him and Kathryn apart during the next days. Meetings were brief, eyes averted. Joe’s elation was punctuated by moments of stark desolation. Was she avoiding him? Was his declaration repugnant to her? He looked for a sign, some indication other than the light kiss she had given him, that she reciprocated his feelings. For days that stretched to eternity Joe waited in an agony of suspense and unrequited love.

I can’t sustain this much longer, have tried to deny my feelings, tried to avoid the vortex I know is lying in wait. And as though my own confusion were not enough Randolph cornered me and warned me not to proceed with a relationship with Joe. He spelled out all its inherent dangers, as though I didn’t know them already. He almost commanded me to deny my feelings.

The longing in my body gives me a different message.

It’s the way Joe looks at me, the promise in his eyes. A world apart is pulling me inexorably into its orbit.

One morning, as Kathryn and Joe were tending a sick calf, their hands touched. She did not take hers away and looked him full in the face. There was no mistaking the message. Joe knew that the uncertainty and the suspense were over. He walked on air the remainder of the day, almost faint with anticipated joy.

After dark had fallen and the house was still, he waited by his door and when he heard her padded footsteps approach he leapt to open it and wrap her in his arms. That night, and every other night that was to come, Joe learned the transcendental power of love and Kathryn an ecstasy beyond the imagined possible.

The others were wary at first in their acceptance of this new development. It altered the pattern of long- established relationships. To Meredith, lost as he always was in his thoughts, it appeared to make scant difference though secretly he harboured his own form of love for Kathryn. Although it neither demanded nor required her response he could not avoid a twinge of envy, swiftly repressed, at Joe’s good fortune. Belinda felt a cold draught of loneliness. As Kathryn and Joe spent more and more time together the confidences she had always shared with Kathryn became less frequent and less intimate. Randolph watched developments with a wary but not necessarily unsympathetic eye. He was no stranger to the joys and pangs of love but feared for Joe and Kathryn, two beings whose roots lay in lands far apart. Only Otto remained subtly aloof, implying silently that their liaison was folly. This Joe swept aside, treating it as an intrusion. Kathryn was more circumspect. She knew well enough the reasons for Otto’s unease but she was not yet ready to share them with Joe. Joe did not press her, knowing that the situation was not as straightforward as it seemed. He was content with present joys.

Happiness is infectious and it spread through the group. Their serious attitude to life was now frequently punctuated with laughter, silence broken with talk. Joe felt he was at last among friends. Even the dread of an attack in the oncoming winter was diminished. But the threat was no less real for that and watch had still to be kept night and day. A changeover took place at midnight based on a rota system which allowed Joe and Kathryn limited nights together.

One night Joe was on duty for the first watch, to be replaced by Kathryn for the second. He heard her climb the tree and, when her head appeared over the edge of the platform, hauled her to her feet. They sat together for a while, contemplating the dark.

‘Aren’t you going?’ she asked eventually. ‘You need some sleep.’

‘Why now? Haven’t had any for the last few weeks.’

They stayed together until morning.

From then on they did duty together, but every second or third night both were free for long ecstatic explorations of surpassing tenderness and passion that left them limp with happiness. They walked in glory.

The weather grew more severe, the temperature dropped below freezing, maintaining its icy grip even at midday. The house was cold, only the kitchen offered a welcome warmth. One night, dark lowering clouds filled the sky.

An unaccustomed silence, a shift in the light, luminous and soft as it filtered through frosted windows, roused Kathryn and Joe early next morning. They beheld a world of snow, blinding in the reflection of the rising sun, the branches of trees raising white arms to a clear sky. Only the paw marks of wild predators disturbed the virgin surface of the ground.

They ran out and, arms spread, threw themselves into banks of snow piled against the house, one impression after another, a row of shining snow angels burnished by light; they kicked up minuscule snowstorms, they pelted each other with snowballs and made a slide along the frozen pond. Kathryn broke a section of ice at its edge and, turning it over, revealed its intricate, crystalline patterns. Joe wished they could be preserved forever.

They made a snowman from two huge rolled snowballs and dressed him in a hat and scarf. The traditional carrot served as his nose, his smiling mouth was formed by pebbles; they pulled a heavy wooden sledge, normally used to haul wood and cattle feed, out of a shed and set it on the crest of the hill. Joe had a sudden vision of his mother taking him to London to buy him a toboggan for Christmas. They had gone to Hamley’s, for an expensive, barely affordable, slatted affair. He wished he had it now as they spun down on an erratic course, arriving in a heap beside a pair of astonished oxen. Up the slope, down, again and again in wild exhilaration, sometimes on their backs watching the sky revolve, then face down, the earth speeding past. Joe clasped Kathryn in a tight, close embrace.

‘I’ll never let you go,’ he said.

At night the moon lit snow reflecting fields and trees, it shone through windows into the house. They left the shutters open while they ate their meals, lights doused. But their vigilance tightened as the danger increased with every wintry day. Joe was taken to a previously unexplored armoury deep in the bowels of the house. Long arrays of axes, swords, scabbards and sharp bladed knives adorned the walls. He was initiated into their use in attack and self defence. He learned to be nimble and sure-footed but regarded with awe and some fear the possibility that he would be expected to kill another human being, an eventuality that had never occurred to him, not even in his wildest imaginings; but with every practice his confidence grew and he learned to handle his weapons with a skill he found exhilarating.

‘We can never quite tell,’ Randolph said, ‘ but usually they come in carts, six or seven of them.’

‘How do they get over the cliffs - they’re much too steep for oxen?’

‘Further east the land is lower.’

‘What weapons do they use?’

‘Swords, knives, axes.’