The Footpath

Wednesday afternoons at Coln Abbey were free, which meant, Will said, that you were free to do whatever you liked within the bounds, and the bounds were the valley, and you had to be back for tea.

“What’s in the valley?” said Frederick.

“The village. The river. Footpaths.” Will was lacing his boots on the bench in the boot room. “Fields. Cows. My farm’s at the top. Up the hill and along a bit.” He pulled the laces tight. “I’m going home to help Dad move some ewes. You could come, but it’s two hours of shouting at sheep, and Dad’d want to clean first.”

“I might go for a walk.”

“Go along the river,” said Will. “Downstream, toward the village, and then there’s a path up the side of the valley to the top, and along the top, and down the other end, and back. It’s signposted. Two hours.” He stood up. “You can’t get lost.”

Frederick went to see Castellanos.

Castellanos was in the small room off the porters’ lodge that the school had given the detail, a room with a desk and a kettle and a window onto the drive and a map of the valley pinned to the wall with the footpaths marked on it in green and, Frederick saw, in red, a number of other lines he did not ask about.

“A walk,” said Castellanos.

“Along the river. Up the side. Along the top. Back for tea.”

Castellanos looked at the map for a while. Then he looked at Frederick.

“Alone,” he said.

“If I can.”

It was not a small thing to ask, and they both knew it. He had not been alone out of doors since he was six, except on the north wing step, and the step did not count, because it was ten yards from a door. Castellanos looked at the map again, at the green lines and the red ones, and at the valley, which was narrow and had one road in and one road out and four hundred people in it who had all been spoken to over the summer by somebody very polite from Gloucestershire Constabulary.

“Sergeant Kimura will be behind you,” said Castellanos at last. “Some way behind. You will not see her.”

“I always see her.”

“Not this time, sir,” said Castellanos, and something about the way he said it made Frederick think that Kimura had asked for this, specifically, as a professional challenge.

---

He went along the river.

It was a grey soft afternoon with no wind, and the valley was so quiet that he could hear the river from fifty yards away, and his own feet on the path, and a wood pigeon somewhere saying the same five notes over and over as though it were trying to remember a telephone number. The path went along the bank under the willows, past a weir, past a field where three horses in rugs stood with their heads together like old men at a funeral, and into the edge of the village, where it went between two cottage gardens on a narrow track with a wall on each side and came out by the churchyard.

The old woman was on the wall by the churchyard gate.

She was there again, in the same coat and headscarf, with her hands on the top of her stick. The small dog was not at her feet. She watched him come out of the track between the gardens and go past the gate along the lane, with her chin up, and he nodded to her, because it seemed rude not to, and she did not nod back. She simply watched him, all the way, the way you watch a horse you are thinking of buying walk up and down.

The signpost was at the end of the lane. It was wooden and green and leaned to one side, and it had three arms. One said Footpath, Bibury 2. One said Footpath, Hatherop 1½. One said nothing at all, because somebody had broken the end off it.

He took the one that said nothing, because it pointed up the side of the valley, and Will had said up the side of the valley.

---

The path went up across a field of short grass, steeply, with the village dropping away behind him. At the top of the field there was a stile, a wooden step over a stone wall, and on the other side of the stile the path went on across another field, and at the top of that field there was another stile, and he went over it, and on the other side of it the path stopped.

It did not stop in any way he could see. It simply stopped being there. There was a large field of grass, sloping gently up toward a line of trees on the skyline, and somewhere in it, presumably, was a path, because there had been a stile to get into it, and stiles do not lead nowhere. But the grass was all the same length, and there was no line through it, and there was no signpost, and there was no gap in the wall at the far side that he could see.

He stood on the stile and looked at the field.

The field was full of bullocks.

There were about twenty of them, young ones, black and white, in a loose group about halfway up, and when he stood on the stile every one of them stopped eating and lifted its head and looked at him, all together, in the same instant, as though somebody had pressed a button.

He had seen a great many things look at him in his life. He had seen a crowd of eighty thousand in front of the Monument look at him on the evening of his proclamation. He had seen the House of Lords look at him. He had never been looked at like this, by twenty large animals with no idea who he was who had simply decided, on the evidence available, that he was the most interesting thing that had ever happened in their field.

He got down off the stile on the field side.

The bullocks began, very slowly, all together, to walk toward him.

---

He did what seemed sensible, which was to walk briskly along the wall at the bottom of the field, away from the bullocks, in the direction that he thought, on balance, the path probably went. The bullocks followed him, at a distance of about thirty yards, in a loose curious crowd, stopping when he stopped and starting when he started. At the corner of the field he found a gate, and went through it, and shut it behind him, and the bullocks came up to the gate and stood along it in a row with their heads over it and watched him go with every sign of regret.

On the other side of the gate was a lane. The lane went downhill to the left and uphill to the right. There was no signpost.

He went uphill, because Will had said along the top.

The lane went up between high banks with hedges on them and came out at the top onto open country, wide fields of pale stubble under the grey sky, and a long straight track going away across them between two walls, and in the distance, a line of trees, and beyond the trees, nothing that looked like a valley at all.

He walked along the track for twenty minutes.

At the end of it there was a crossroads of four tracks, all of them identical, all of them going away between walls across fields of stubble, and in the middle of the crossroads, on a post, a small round metal disc with an arrow on it pointing in a direction that was not, as far as he could tell, any of the four.

He stood at the crossroads and admitted to himself, for the first time in his life, that he was lost.

He had never been lost. He had never been allowed to be. There had always been somebody, a step behind, or a car at the end of the road, or a map on a wall with red lines on it. He had been taken to places all his life and brought back from them, and he had never once had to find his own way from one to the other, and he thought now, standing at a crossroads of four identical tracks in the middle of England on a Wednesday afternoon, that this was probably a serious gap in his education, and that somebody should have noticed.

He thought that if he was found here, by a farmer, lost, the King of fourteen countries unable to find one valley in Gloucestershire, it would be in every newspaper in Britain by morning and on the front of the Evening Star in New Westminster by the afternoon. He thought about what Mr Abernathy would say. He thought about what his father would say, which would be very little, and would take a long time, and would be all the more devastating for it.

From behind him, along one of the four tracks, a voice said loudly, “Ernest! ERNEST! Get back here, you little sod, she’ll have my guts!”

And a small rough-haired brown and white dog came tearing round the corner of the wall at full speed with its ears inside out and its tongue out, and saw Frederick, and stopped dead, and sat down at his feet, and looked up at him, panting, with an air of having found exactly what it had been looking for.

---

The boy came round the corner a moment later at a run.

He was about Frederick’s age, perhaps a little older, broad, not tall, in jeans and a pair of muddy work boots and a faded red sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up, with untidy sandy hair and a face that looked as though it had been out in the weather every day of its life and had enjoyed most of them. He had a dog lead in one hand, swinging, with no dog on it.

He stopped when he saw Frederick. He looked at the dog sitting at Frederick’s feet.

“Oh, thank God,” said the boy. “Don’t move. Don’t move. If you move he’ll go. He goes for rabbits. He’s never caught one in his life, he’s eleven years old and he’s got three teeth, but he’s convinced. He thinks he’s a wolf.” He came forward very carefully, the way you come forward toward something that might go off, and crouched, and clipped the lead onto the dog’s collar, and stood up, and let out a long breath. “Right. Right. Got you, you little monster.” He looked at Frederick. “Sorry. Not you. Him.”

“That’s all right.”

“If I’d lost him she’d have killed me. She would. She’d have had me stuffed. She’d have put me on the wall next to her and made me look at the church for the rest of my life.” He looked down at the dog, which was now sitting on his boot, looking up at him with the satisfaction of a dog that has had an excellent afternoon. “Wouldn’t she, Ernest? She’d have had me stuffed.”

“Ernest,” said Frederick.

“That’s his name. Daft name for a dog. She named him.” The boy pushed his hair out of his eyes with the back of the hand that had the lead in it. “Are you all right? You look a bit lost.”

“I am lost.”

The boy looked at him, properly, for the first time, up and down: the boots that were too new, the waterproof coat that was one of three because it was England, the face.

“You’re from the school,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’re one of the Americans.”

“Yes.”

“I can tell. You’ve got an American coat.” He said it as though it were a medical condition. “Where are you trying to get to?”

“Back to the school. For tea. I came up the path from the church, and it went over a stile, and then there wasn’t one.”

“Oh, that path.” The boy nodded with deep understanding. “That’s not a path. That’s a lie. Everyone gets lost on that one. Old Mr Purvis took the sign down in 1994 because he didn’t want people in his field, and the council never put it back, and every year about four people go up it and get chased by Purvis’s bullocks and come out at Ready Token.” He looked round at the crossroads. “Which is here. This is Ready Token.”

“This is a place?”

“It’s a crossroads. Romans built it. Well. The road. Nobody knows who built the crossroads, it was just sort of there.” He looked at Frederick again. “Did the bullocks chase you?”

“They followed me.”

“That’s chasing, for bullocks. They’re not fast. They just don’t stop.” He grinned suddenly, a huge grin that took up the whole of his face. “They’ll have loved you. They don’t get many Americans. Come on. I’ll walk you back. It’s down this way.” He jerked his head at one of the four identical tracks. “I’m going that way anyway, I’ve got to get him back before she notices he went for a rabbit, or she’ll know I let him off the lead, and she’ll know I let him off the lead because I always let him off the lead, and then she’ll give me the look.” He started walking. “You don’t want the look. Nobody wants the look. I’m Jack, by the way.”

“Frederick.”

Jack looked at him sideways as they walked.

“Frederick what?”

He had been asked his name thousands of times. He had been asked it by people who knew it already and were asking to be polite, and by people who knew it already and were asking to see what he would say, and by children on rope lines at the Monument who knew it already and wanted to hear it said. He did not think he had ever been asked it, in seventeen years, by somebody who actually did not know.

“Hanover,” he said.

“Hanover?” said Jack. “Like the King?”

“Yes.”

“Unlucky,” said Jack, with genuine sympathy, and went on walking. “There’s a boy in Cirencester called Tom Windsor, and he gets it all the time. People do the wave at him.” He did the wave, a little twist of the wrist, at the hedge. “Do people do the wave at you?”

“Sometimes.”

“Bet they do. Well, I won’t.” He looked down at Ernest. “Will we, Ernest? We won’t do the wave at Hanover.” He looked back up. “That all right? Hanover? Because I’m not calling anyone Frederick, nobody’s called Frederick, you sound like a butler.”

“Hanover’s fine,” said Frederick.

---

Jack talked the whole way.

It was a mile and a half, Frederick worked out afterwards, from Ready Token down the track and along the edge of a wood and down a long field into the top of the valley and along the side of it to the school, and Jack talked for every yard of it, loudly, cheerfully, without appearing to need to breathe. He talked about the bullocks, and about old Mr Purvis, who was ninety and had once fired a shotgun at a hot-air balloon. He talked about Ernest, who was eleven and had three teeth and had once eaten an entire Christmas cake, with the foil. He talked about the village, which was called Coln Saint Aldwyns, not Coln Abbey, that’s just the school, and which had a church and a pub and a shop that was also the post office and was open when Mrs Dunning felt like it. He talked about the pub, which was the New Inn, and was not new, and had been the New Inn since 1632.

“That’s new,” said Jack, “round here.”

He talked about cricket. He played cricket for the village on Sundays. He bowled.

“What does that mean?” said Frederick.

Jack stopped walking. Ernest stopped too and sat down on his boot again.

“What does what mean?”

“Bowled.”

Jack looked at him with an expression of profound, almost religious shock, as if Frederick had asked him what the sky was for.

“You don’t know what bowling is.”

“Not in cricket.”

“You’ve never played cricket.”

“I’ve never seen it. Not properly. I play baseball.”

“Oh my God,” said Jack, to the field, with enormous satisfaction, and started walking again, faster, and talked about cricket the rest of the way down, with his hands, at length, at volume, so that by the time they came down the last field into the valley above the school Frederick knew what a wicket was and what an over was and what leg before wicket was, roughly, and had been told that he would never, ever understand it, and that nobody did, and that that was the point.

“I’ll teach you,” said Jack, at the bottom of the field, by the gate into the lane above the school. “In the nets. At the club. There’s indoor nets in Cirencester for the winter. I’ll teach you to bowl.” He considered Frederick, up and down, with his head on one side. “You’ll be rubbish.”

“Probably.”

“Definitely. Everyone American’s rubbish. It’s the elbow. You lot throw. You’ve got to bowl, it’s different, you can’t bend the elbow, it’s against the rules.” He held the gate open with one hand and Ernest’s lead with the other. “But you’ll be rubbish properly. That’s the main thing.”

Frederick went through the gate.

On the other side, in the lane, leaning against the wall with her arms folded and her waterproof hood up, as though she had been there for some time and expected to be there for some time more, was Kimura.

She looked at Frederick. She looked at Jack. She looked at Ernest.

“Afternoon,” said Kimura.

Jack stopped in the gateway.

“Afternoon,” said Jack. He looked at her, at her hood and her folded arms and her face, which was doing its thing of looking as if the lane had told it a joke. He looked at Frederick. He looked back at her. “Who are you?”

“I’m with him,” said Kimura.

“With him how?”

Kimura considered the question.

“Professionally,” she said.

Jack turned and looked at Frederick.

It took about three seconds. Frederick watched it happen: the name, Hanover, going round behind Jack’s eyes and coming back the other way and meeting the woman in the lane and the face, and the face he must have seen on every coin in his pocket and every note, in the little window, looking cross, and the newspaper, THE KING IS COMING (TO SCHOOL), and the school down the hill, and the coach last Friday going past the churchyard, and his great-grandmother on the wall watching it with her chin up.

Jack’s mouth opened.

“Oh, bloody hell,” said Jack.

“Sorry,” said Frederick.

“You’re him.”

“Yes.”

“You let me go on about cricket. For a mile and a half. You let me tell you about Tom Windsor.” Jack’s face had gone a dark red from the collar of the sweatshirt to the roots of his hair. “I said you sounded like a butler.”

“I didn’t mind.”

“I said you’d be rubbish.”

“I will be rubbish,” said Frederick. “You said so. Properly.”

Jack stared at him. Ernest, at his feet, looked from one of them to the other.

Then, slowly, the red began to go out of Jack’s face, and something else came into it, from the bottom up, the way the light had come into the window of the aeroplane over the sea, and it was the grin. The whole of it. It took over his face completely.

“Still Hanover, though,” said Jack.

“Yes,” said Frederick. “Please.”

“Right,” said Jack. “Right.” He looked down at Ernest. “Come on, you. She’ll be wanting her tea.” He looked at Kimura. “Is she going to follow me now?”

“No,” said Kimura. “I’ve been following you for an hour. You’re very loud.”

Jack went off down the lane toward the village with Ernest trotting beside him. At the corner by the churchyard he turned round, walking backwards, and shouted up the lane, at the top of his voice, so that the wood pigeons went up out of the trees: “NETS! NOVEMBER! YOU’LL BE RUBBISH!”

And went round the corner.

Frederick stood in the lane.

“An hour?” he said.

“Since the stile,” said Kimura. “You went the wrong way at the signpost. You went the wrong way at the gate. You went the wrong way at Ready Token, and you’d have gone the wrong way again if he hadn’t turned up.” She unfolded her arms. “I was going to give you another ten minutes and then come and stand where you could see me and look disappointed.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because you were lost, sir,” said Kimura. “Properly lost. On your own. For the first time in your life.” She started down the lane. “I thought you’d want to have done it.”

He walked beside her.

“How many out of ten?” he said.

Kimura thought about it.

“For being lost, four,” she said. “For getting found, nine.” She glanced sideways. “For the company, I’ll let you know.”

---

On Saturday the class went to Scotland.

It had been on the calendar since June and nobody had believed it until the morning came: a train from Kemble at five, before it was light, to Bristol, and another north, the whole of England going past the window in the grey and then the green and then the brown of the hills, and the border somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, which nobody saw, because there was no sign, only a sudden change in the colour of the stone in the walls, and Mr Ferrante standing up in the carriage holding his map of 1779 against the window and saying, “Now. That was it. We’re in Scotland,” and the whole carriage looking out of the window at a field of sheep that looked exactly like the last field of sheep.

There was a Highland games below Stirling, in a field at the foot of the castle rock, and a King had not been to it in anybody’s memory, and the King of Great Britain had been asked, months ago, in a letter in a careful hand from a committee in a village hall, and had said yes, because his mother had shown him the letter and he had liked the handwriting.

He had not known what a Highland games was.

It turned out to be a field full of very large men in kilts throwing very heavy things very short distances, while bagpipes played somewhere at the edge in a way that made it impossible to think about anything else, and small girls in velvet jackets danced on a wooden platform over two crossed swords without ever once touching them, and the castle stood above all of it on its rock against a sky going pink, grey and huge and very old and his.

He sat in a wooden stand with the class. Nobody had built a special box. The committee had put a cushion on one end of the front bench and a small handwritten card on the cushion that said RESERVED, and an old man in a kilt with a white beard to his waist came over at the start and shook his hand and said, in an accent Frederick could barely understand, that it was very good of him to come, and that his family had been coming to these games since before any Hanoverian slept in that castle up there, and that he bore him no ill will for it, none at all, and went away.

At four o’clock they asked for volunteers from the crowd for the caber.

The caber was a tree. It had had its branches taken off and its bark, and it was about nineteen feet long and the thickness of a man’s thigh at one end, and you were supposed to pick it up by the thin end, vertically, and run with it, and throw it so that it turned over in the air and landed on the fat end and fell forward away from you. The large men in kilts had been doing it all afternoon. One of them had done it perfectly, and the crowd had made a noise like a train.

The announcer asked for a volunteer from the visiting school.

Thirty heads in the stand turned, slowly, to look at the tallest of them.

“No,” said Theo.

“Theo,” said thirty voices.

“No. Absolutely not. I’m a Page of Honour. I have a warrant. It says I’m supposed to carry things for him, it doesn’t say anything about trees.”

He went down. They made him. Kit Barraclough, who had come on the trip as a guest of the exchange, stood up on the bench and shouted ARTICULATED at him for reasons nobody in Scotland understood, and the crowd, who did not know what it meant either, took it up as a chant, and Theo went down into the field with his ears scarlet, between two enormous men in kilts who looked at him with great kindness, as at a calf, and they stood the caber up for him, and he put his arms round the bottom of it, and lifted.

He got it off the ground. That was the remarkable thing. Frederick heard the crowd make a little surprised noise when the end left the grass.

Then Theo took one step with it, and a second, and on the third step the top of the caber, nineteen feet up in the pink evening, began very slowly and majestically to lean toward Stirling Castle.

Theo leaned with it. He leaned back, to stop it, and it leaned further, and he took a step backward, and then another, and the caber went on leaning, slowly, enormously, like a church spire deciding to lie down, and the two large men in kilts stepped smartly out of the way, and the crowd made a long rising noise of horrified joy, and Theo Hartigan, Page of Honour, holding the end of a nineteen-foot tree in both arms, sat down very hard on the grass of Scotland with the caber on top of him, gently, at full length, like a duvet.

He lay there.

The crowd roared.

The old man with the white beard came over to the front of the stand again, wiping his eyes, and leaned on the rail beside Frederick’s cushion, and said, when he could speak, “That, sir. That is the best thing I’ve seen at these games in sixty years.”

Down on the field, the two large men lifted the caber off Theo, one at each end, and stood him up, and dusted him down, and patted him on the back so hard that he went forward a step each time.

He looked up at the stand. He found Frederick on the cushion.

He did not wave. He held up both hands, open, with the fingers spread, in the gesture of a man who has done the thing he was asked to do and wishes it noted that he did not enjoy it.

Behind Frederick in the stand, Kimura said, to nobody in particular, “Ten.”