The Haunt by A. L. Barker Page B

where you heard it or who from, it’s bad language, and coming from someone your age it’s disgusting.’
    ‘Are you angry? Please don’t be angry with me—’
    ‘Promise you’ll never use such words again.’ A tall order to be carried into manhood.
    James cried, ‘I promise – cross my heart and hope to die!’
    Owen told Angela, ‘I found him sitting in the middle of the road.’
    She was opening a box of cornflakes and did not look up. ‘He was probably waiting for you.’
    ‘I think you should know.’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘He’s out there now, swinging on the gate.’ Owen said sharply, ‘I’m fond of him and he seems to like being with me, but he can’t always be.’
    ‘I didn’t know he’d gone out. It shan’t happen again.’
    ‘Can you guarantee it? I’d hate to feel in any way to blame if something happened.’
    She looked up. ‘Will you come back later – this evening, after he’s in bed? I must talk to you.’
    She was holding the box of cornflakes in her arms – ‘A great British Breakfast, fortified with 9 added vitamins’.
    Owen resisted the urge to touch her hair.
    *
    ‘Talk? What about?’ said Elissa.
    ‘James, if I’m not mistaken.’
    ‘Do you want to get involved?’
    ‘I think she’s having trouble with him.’
    ‘Nothing, surely, that can’t be sorted out at school.’
    ‘I asked why he doesn’t go to school.’
    ‘What did she say?’
    ‘She didn’t.’ An equivocation, Owen knew: he had asked the boy, not his mother.
    ‘Mrs Latimer says they wouldn’t accept him for play-school because he vandalised the toy cupboard.’
    ‘It figures.’ Owen grinned. ‘He’s knocked the stuffing out of his woolly rabbit.’
    ‘He would, wouldn’t he – she’s kept him from the toys his father bought him. The trouble,’ Elissa said crisply, ‘will be of her making.’
    She had taken against Angela Hartop, thanks to the invidious Mrs Latimer. ‘A woman either loves or hates, there is no middle course’. Horace probably said that.
    *
    Angela was at the window, watching. Owen didn’t altogether relish being watched for.
    ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t come.’
    It seemed that the answer to Elissa’s question was that he was already involved. ‘Is James in bed?’
    ‘Yes, but he’s being tiresome and won’t settle. Let’s go where he can’t hear us.’
    Owen followed her into a small room stocked rather than furnished with an over-large suite, a break-front cabinet and a pottery Alsatian. There was a disused air, like that of the front parlours of his youth.
    ‘Do sit down. It’s called “The Tree of Heaven”.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘The design.’ She patted the settee beside her.
    ‘What did you want to talk about?’
    ‘I want you to know the truth.’
    ‘About James?’
    ‘It’s more than that’ – she was impatient – ‘much more—’
    He held out his hand: she took it, came to her knees at his side. This time he did not resist: he touched her hair, threaded it through his fingers, as soft and silken as he had known it would be. But when she turned his hand and kissed his palm, he stood up, pulling her to her feet. Confused by his own feelings, he was unprepared for hers. She put her arms round his waist and folded against him. He didn’t believe it was happening, but didn’t Horace say ‘the story is about you’?
    It was the child who reminded him that he was about to commit adultery: James, in his pyjamas, holding the rabbit-thing by its remaining ear. ‘He can’t sleep.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because he can’t shut his eyes!’
    ‘Poor fellow,’ said Owen.
    ‘Come and read to me.’
    Angela said, ‘Back to bed with you at once!’
    Owen glimpsed James’s expression of open malice, fleeting and not unnatural in a child reproved.
    ‘Tell you what, we’ll read till you drop off. I know what it’s like when you can’t sleep.’ He whispered to Angela, ‘I’ll be back.’
    When James was in bed, there was the question of what to