I wondered if I had made a mistake, recalling him to her like that, at this particular moment, but I had been genuinely curious. I fussed Jochen into the car and settled myself inside.
I wound down the window, wanting to reassure her, one last time.
'Everything's fine, Sal. It's over, finished. You've no need to worry anymore.'
She blew us a kiss and wandered back inside.
We had just driven out of the gate when Jochen said, 'I think I left my jersey in the kitchen.' I stopped the car and climbed out. I went back in through the front door, pushing it open and calling cheerily, 'It's just me,' and walked through to the kitchen. Jochen's sweater was on the floor under a chair. I stooped and picked it up and realised my mother must have gone back out to the garden.
I peered through the window, looking for her, and saw her, eventually, half hidden by the big laburnum by the gate in the hedge that gave on to the meadow. She was looking through her binoculars, trained on the wood, traversing slowly this way and that. Across the meadow the big oaks still heaved and thrashed in the wind and my mother searched amongst their trunks, amongst the darkness of the undergrowth, for signs of someone watching for her, waiting to find her unguarded, at ease, uncaring. It was then that I realised this was exactly how she never would be. My mother would always be looking towards Witch Wood, as she was now, waiting and expecting that someone was going to come and take her away. I stood there in the kitchen, watching her staring across the meadow still searching for her nemesis and I thought, suddenly, that this is all our lives – this is the one fact that applies to us all, that makes us what we are, our common mortality, our common humanity. One day someone is going to come and take us away: you don't need to have been a spy, I thought, to feel like this. My mother watched on, staring across the meadow at the trees.
And the trees in the dark wood moved and shifted in the wind, and the sun patches skidded across the meadow, cloud shadows rushing by. I saw the blond uncut grass bend and flow almost like a living thing, like the pelt or fleece of some great animal: wind-combed, wind-stirred, ever-moving – and my mother watching, waiting.
About the author
William Boyd was born in Ghana. He was brought up there and in Nigeria. He was educated at the universities of Nice, Glasgow and Oxford. He is married and lives in Chelsea, London.
He is the author of eight previous novels.
A Good Man in Africa
won the Whitbread Literary Award for the Best First Novel;
An Ice-Cream War
won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize;
Brazzaville Beach
won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and
The Blue Afternoon
was the winner of the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize for Fiction.
His most recent novel was
Any Human Heart
.
In addition, some thirteen of his screenplays (including the adaption of his novel
Armadillo
) have been filmed and in 1998 he both wrote and directed the feature film
The Trench
.