So fixed had he become on the window, he almost didn’t notice when Clare slipped into his room, draped in a blanket and carrying a pillow, and took up her post as a sentry might, at the foot of his bed. Maybe he felt a little warmer. Or maybe he was already asleep.
3
Michaelmas daisies
By the time he’d woken in the morning, the sun was already streaming through Fitz’s window, and the bare white walls of his room had dazed his smeared and smarting eyes. He had known even before he heard the hoe scratching in the garden below that it was late – that Clare had had her breakfast, and that she had already dressed in her work clothes and set about her chores for the morning. While the sun climbed the wall, Fitz had curled in his bed, reading from Mr Ahmadi’s book. Piecing the words with his finger, letting them soak into his tongue, he had read until his back began to ache.
Now he turned over and slipped from the bed. From his window Fitz saw, first, the havoc that the night’s strong winds had made among Clare’s trellises and beanpoles. Then, as she stood, holding her hip, he saw her, too; she was trying to restore order. When she looked up, he waved. She smiled and briefly struck her familiar farmer pose, which almost made him giggle – but then she went straight back to her work, all muck and twine.
At the foot of the stairs Fitz regarded the chest of drawers where it still stood butted against the front door. He had forgotten. A piece of the lock hung broken from the door frame, and a cool breeze whistled through the gap. Now, by the late-morning light flooding through the glass above the door, the hallway seemed smaller, less consequential; the door had gone back to being just a door; and Fitz noticed the knot in his stomach, which had tightened quickly, begin to subside. Maybe it had been a misunderstanding. Maybe the man had just been troubled, or confused.
His thoughts were interrupted by an abrupt knocking. Fitz started. At first he thought it was Clare, somehow locked out in the garden, asking to be let in, and he set off towards the kitchen. But when the knocking sounded again, he realized with alarm that it was the sound of someone’s knuckles beating against glass – the glass of the broad bay window in the cottage’s front room. The door to this room stood open, and he picked his way gingerly behind it, to a place from which he could almost see the window.
When he finally dared to look, there was no one there.
He crossed the room, and pushed his way in silence between the table and one of the chairs that stood before the window’s broad view. Outside, the short lawn led over a hedge to a little lane. Beyond that a stand of old oaks, mixed with hazel and birch, hid the railway line beyond. Fitz almost didn’t notice the little blue car parked behind the hedge.
But he did notice the sudden rustling beneath the window. He was already retreating when a tall, sandy-haired man, his glasses half fallen off his nose, stood up only inches from the windowpane. He was holding three snails in his left hand; with the other, he fixed his glasses, inadvertently wiping little trails of snail slime across the lenses. He was beaming, despite the slime.
‘Snails!’ he announced.
This was evidently not the intruder with the cane. Fitz smiled back.
‘You have slime on your glasses,’ he said, speaking in an exaggerated way in order to be understood through the glass, and pointing.
The man crossed his eyes, squinting hard, as if he was lost in deep contemplation of a particularly complicated mathematical puzzle. After a little of this computation, he set the snails on the window sill, drew out the tail of his shirt from beneath his belt, and started to wipe his glasses with it.
‘I’m Ned More,’ he said. ‘You must be –’
‘Fitz,’ said Fitz. ‘Fitzroy, really, but that’s a stupid name, so my mum just calls me Fitz.’
Ned finished wiping his glasses and restored them to his nose. Probably his hands had been soiled with dirt from picking up the snails; somehow or other, it had got on his shirt, and his glasses now looked as if he had deliberately spread them with mud. He sighed.
Fitz laughed. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, and dipped a napkin in a vase of fresh flowers that was standing on the table. He flipped open the old lock, lifted the sash window, and handed the napkin to the man, who cleaned his glasses again.
‘Thanks,’ said Ned. ‘I’ve had a long night.’
‘Me, too,’ said Fitz.
Clare’s breakfast still stood on the table – a pot of coffee and a jug of milk, a loaf of bread turned on its side and covered with a cloth, a small plate holding a slab of butter, and the last jar of plum jam from the summer before. Fitz touched the coffee pot and, finding it warm, fetched a cup and saucer from the shelf beside the fire. He poured out the coffee without spilling a drop, and presented it to Ned over the sill.
‘Coffee is good after a long night,’ he said.
They agreed about a lot of things, beginning with the medicinal properties of coffee. Fitz wasn’t quite sure how they got on to the subject of Tamburlaine – something about summer storms coming off the sea like cavalry off the plains at dawn – but within a few minutes they found themselves swapping stories about the difficulty of using elephants to attack fortified positions in the Hindu Kush. Mr Ahmadi’s library had taught Fitz
