Lesson To Learn

Reluctantly the child took a step towards her, looking backwards over his shoulder as he did so. Now there was fear in his eyes as well as tension.

What was he running away from? Sarah wondered as she deliberately, very slowly opened the rucksack beside her, and equally deliberately, with nonchalant casualness, removed a can of soft drink and some sandwiches. The child was betraying his youth by his very lack of preparation for his odyssey. His clothes, too, seemed to have been chosen without much regard for their practicality—a pair of heavy jeans, a T-shirt, and on his feet what looked like a pair of baseball boots. The jeans were far too hot and heavy for this weather and they were also too big for him. His T-shirt and his boots, though, were obviously expensive, which ruled out the jeans having been bought with extra growing-room…which seemed to suggest that whoever had bought them had not really been sure of his size.

A tiny frown touched her forehead as Sarah deliberately took her time over extricating the map from the rucksack.

Pretending to be unaware of his tension and the anxious way he kept on looking back in the direction he had just come, she patted the ground beside her, and said easily, ‘Come and sit down. I’m afraid I’m not very good with maps, so it may take me quite a while to find out if you’re on the right path. I’m only on holiday here, you see. What about you? Do you live round here?’

She watched him as he automatically started to respond to her question and then caught himself up after he had started to say, ‘Yes. I live…’ his face suddenly settling into stubborn unhappy lines. ‘I’m staying here,’ he told her gruffly. ‘But I don’t really live here.’

‘Ah.’

Sarah unfolded the map, and then, although she herself was not particularly hungry, she unwrapped some of Mrs Beattie’s sandwiches and started to eat one, pausing to indicate the open foil-wrapped package and to say, ‘Would you like a sandwich?’

He nodded his head, and then said huskily, ‘Yes, please. I am rather hungry.’

He had excellent manners; his speech was almost old-fashionedly formal, as though he had spent a long time with older people. Thoughtfully Sarah watched him as he devoured his sandwich.

She knew already that she would not let him go; that she would have to somehow or other win his confidence and then restore him to his family.

A child of his age on his own…there were so many hazards…so many dangers, from man as well as from nature. His family, whoever they were and wherever they lived, must be going frantic with worry if they knew that he was missing.

She suspected he had not come very far and that the exhaustion she could see so clearly in his eyes came more from misery and fear than from the physical effort of having walked a long way.

He had a scratch on one arm where he had obviously pushed past a bramble, and there were smears of dirt on his T-shirt. He had finished his sandwich and was eyeing the others in the pile with a hungry intensity that made Sarah hide a small smile as she offered casually, ‘Finished? Have another?’

‘You know,’ she told him as he bit eagerly into the bread, ‘I’m not sure that you are on the right path. From this map, it looks as though…’ She paused, frowning, ignoring the tension she could feel emanating from him. ‘I think you could possibly pick up the path half a mile or so further on.’

‘Half a mile; is that a very long way?’

‘Fairly…and then it’s another six or seven miles to Ludlow. Are you going there for something important?’

As she looked at him she saw that he was avoiding her eyes, not wanting to lie to her, but obviously not wanting to tell her the truth either.

‘Never mind…there might be a short cut,’ she offered, re-studying the map. ‘It’s a pity I don’t have a car, otherwise I could drive you there.’

She paused to see how he was going to react to this suggestion, and was relieved to see hesitance and reluctance.

‘I’m not allowed to go in cars with strangers,’ he told her immediately.

Sarah suppressed a small sigh. Poor kid, hadn’t anyone warned him that talking to strangers could be equally dangerous?

‘No, of course not,’ she agreed gravely, investigating the rucksack and offering him an apple. He was still standing up and she patted the ground beside her again and invited, ‘If you come and sit down here you can have a look at the map. I’m not very good at reading them.’

‘No…my mother isn’t either…’ He broke off, his expression suddenly changing. ‘I mean…she wasn’t.’

He had turned his head, tucking it into his shoulder defensively, a betraying tremor wobbling his voice.

Was his mother no longer alive, as his words seemed to imply, or was she merely no longer a part of his life? Sarah was in no doubt now that he was running away and that he was desperately unhappy, but he was still obeying her suggestion and coming to sit down beside her.

He was old enough to have left his baby-fat behind him, but his arms and legs still had the softness of early childhood, and as he sat down beside her he smelled of clean young skin and sunshine.

‘My name’s Sarah…what’s yours?’ she asked him as she moved the map so that he could look at it.

‘Robert,’ he told her, ‘although…’

‘Robert…that’s a very grown-up name,’ Sarah admired. ‘Doesn’t anyone call you Bobbie?’

He shook his head.

‘My…my…Nana used to call me Robbie, but he said it was a baby’s name. He calls me Robert.’ His face suddenly crumpled up, tears shimmering in his eyes, and Sarah respected that the ‘he’ referred to with such anger and dislike was most probably his father.

Unwilling to probe too much and to frighten him into silence before she had obtained from him the information she needed, she didn’t push him but said simply and pacifically, ‘Well, Robert is a very grown-up name, and I expect you must be…well, at least eight.’

She could see the way her words caused his chest to swell with pride and his tears to disappear.

‘I’m six,’ he told her. ‘Almost seven. Well, I’ll be seven in May.’

In May. It was only July now, which meant that he was in fact only just six, but Sarah widened her eyes admiringly and commented that she had thought he was much, much older.

‘Won’t your…your nana be missing you, though, Robert?’ she suggested gently. ‘She’ll be wondering where you are, I’m sure. Did you leave her a note?’

Immediately his eyes filled with tears as he shook his head and burst out, ‘Nana’s dead. She died in a car accident with my mother and Tom…and I had to come back here and live with…with him. I hate him. I want to go back home. I don’t want to stay with him any more. Mrs Richards could look after me. She did before when my mother and Tom were away and Nana was ill. I don’t have to stay here with him. My mother told me that. She said I didn’t have to see him if I didn’t want to and I didn’t want to. I don’t like him. My mother said he’d never wanted me anyway…that he only wanted me to get at her.’

As she listened to the jumbled staccato words Sarah fought down the wave of compassion making her own eyes moisten and her heart ache.

From what he wasn’t saying as much as from what he was, she was beginning to build up a clear picture of what must have happened. His parents were either separated or divorced; he had obviously lived with his mother and perhaps his grandmother as well in some other part of the country, and from what he had said it sounded as though he had lost them in a car accident and was now living with his father.A father who, it seemed, had never wanted him and who had perhaps only reluctantly accepted responsibility for him now. Poor child, no wonder he was so unhappy, no wonder he was running away, but, much as her heart ached for him, much as she sympathised with him, she had to find a way of discovering where he lived and who his father was.

‘So you’re going to find Mrs Richards, is that it?’ she hazarded, causing him to nod his head. ‘Where does she live? Is it far away?’

‘She lives in London,’ he told her importantly.

‘London; that’s a long way to go,’ Sarah commented sympathetically. ‘A very long way. Have you been walking for a long time?’

‘I left after breakfast,’ he told her immediately and innocently, causing Sarah a panic of guilt for the way she was deceiving him. But it was for his own good…his own protection. ‘I had to wait until he…my father had gone to work. Mrs Jacobs went out shopping. She told me not to go out of the garden. I don’t like her.’

Mrs Jacobs. Sarah bit her bottom lip. Surely she had heard Mrs Beattie mentioning a Mrs Jacobs who was one of her neighbours in the village? She had gained the impression that the two women were not good friends and that Sally’s cleaner heartily despised and disliked the other woman.

‘Did…did you leave your father a note?’ Sarah asked him.

He shook his head, his face settling into a stubborn mask.

‘He won’t care. He’ll be glad to see the back of me,’ he told her. ‘Mrs Jacobs says I’m a nuisance and that I cause too much dis…dis…’

‘Disruption?’ Sarah suggested. She suppressed a sigh as he nodded his head, plainly impressed by her mind-reading abilities. Much as she sympathised with him, she was going to have to get his address out of him and take him home.

Unpleasant though both Mrs Jacobs and his father sounded, she could see no obvious signs of any kind of physical or emotional abuse about him, and she was experienced enough to have recognised them had they been there. For all his fear and apprehension, he lacked the desperate silence, the smell of fear that seemed to emanate from such children.

But he was unhappy, desperately so, and she could not help wondering a little about his father, questioning what manner of man he was. She had the impression from what Robert had told her that his father saw him as a burden…a nuisance.