News from Norfolk

The Scarecrow? Well, therein lies a tale! Perhaps it’s best that I simply tell you all the facts, such as they are, and let you draw your own conclusions.  

Jeremy and the twins invited themselves to stay up at Pagets for a few weeks. Had I told you they’d moved back to Pimlico? After Jenny died, I was hardly using the London place — maybe two or three times a year at absolute most — so when Jeremy was offered the new job, he and Mai decided that the time had come to bid sayonara to old Tokyo. 

The twins had just celebrated their fourth birthdays, so it wasn’t too late to swap school systems. Also, young children are hugely resilient, aren’t they? They thrive on change. They aren’t set in their ways like the rest of us miserable old reactionaries. 

All that was left to do, anyway, was for Mai to tidy up a few loose ends in Japan, while Jeremy made a start on sorting out the Pimlico digs with the twins in tow. 

Late-summer London, however, was hot and airless — especially so, one assumes, for little ones accustomed to ultra-modern, high-rise flats. I suspect they’d lived their whole lives amid artificial air conditioning — a noisy, charmless, soul-destroying abomination, if you ask me! — not that you did. Meanwhile the Pimlico flat had been taken over by a local firm of builders, along with their power tools, radios and nonstop cheeky-chappie banter. It was all too much. 

Hence the improvised sojourn with Grandpa amid the quieter charms of the twins’ ancestral rural Norfolk. 

It had been a while. When I’d last seen the twins — Jeremy, as you’ll recall, had offered them up as a sort of peace-offering to a dying if still alertly aware, acid-tongued Jenny — they were hardly more than two interchangeable bundles of life, sporting wild crests of raven-black glossy hair, mostly distinguishable by the differently-coloured dummies, one pink and one blue, permanently lodged within their chubby little faces. Jenny disapproved of dummies — just as she disapproved of Mai, Japan, Jeremy’s career changes and quite a lot else that came her way — but, for once, said nothing. Perhaps she had finally realised that there was, at that point, very little more to be said. 

That, though, is bye-the-bye. I had better get on with the story — in particular, how the Scarecrow got mixed up with it all. 

August was almost at an end. The three of them rolled up, after various delays, mid-afternoon, in Jeremy’s little car — Jeremy, Ren and a reluctant, sleepy Kitty who had to be prised out of the car like a clam from its enveloping shell. 

Thankfully, three years on, the twins had become much more distinctive. Ren, the boy, turns out to be heir to his father’s stolid, stoical, uncomplaining quality. There are moments when this accords him a gravitas unsettling for his years. Kitty, in contrast, is very much Jenny’s granddaughter — pretty, mercurial, hard to please — elusive, and more than slightly fey. 

Rather to my surprise, the twins arrived clutching “smart” phones, these having replaced the dummies as full-time, non-negotiable accoutrements. Ren’s had a blue cover. Kitty’s was pink. The twins consulted these devices constantly. Insofar as they interacted with each other, in those first few hours, it was to argue — in rapid-fire Japanese — or occasionally to bicker over charging cables. Most of the time, though, they communed solely with their devices, rapt little faces eternally half-lit by the glow of the screen in front of them. 

Grandchildren are a very odd business — have you noticed this? 

Now and then, Ren will make a lopsided grimace as prelude to some crucial decision — chocolate or vanilla? jam or honey? — and it’s as if my own dear father, fifty years dead and buried, were seated there at the table with me, doing the same — or, for that matter, as if I were watching Jeremy, who’s inherited that mannerism. Kitty, in contrast, when she can be coaxed into amusement, possesses a sharp, barking, faintly upsetting laugh which brings poor Jenny, bless her, back to uncanny life. 

Yet at other times, especially during that first day or two, the twins seemed entirely alien — their nurture seeming to constitute, as it were, a sort of leap of genetic faith. 

This, however, is not getting us any further with the whole business about the Scarecrow. I’d better stop dawdling and get on with it. 

Jeremy and the twins arrived. After the usual exchange of greetings, more or less awkward embraces and the traditional set of complaints regarding the state of motorway services, the new arrivals were shown their rooms, left for a while to their own concerns, and eventually reappeared downstairs. 

Once they’d been fed and watered, a sort of aimless, discontented torpor descended upon us all. I suppose it was a sort of reaction to the shock of seeing each other again, although perhaps it was only too much Victoria sponge, consumed mid-afternoon. 

In order to give some shape to the proceedings, anyway, I suggested that we might all go for a walk, not least so that the little ones might “stretch their legs”, as the saying goes. 

Jeremy — who, incidentally looked older and much more harried than I remembered him — eventually disengaged himself from his own iPhone. “Sorry, Pa, what was that?” 

“I said, oh beloved son, that perhaps we might all go for a bit of a ramble before dinner? You’ve had a long drive. The twins must be fed up with sitting in a car for, what was it, four hours? Five? Perhaps they’ll want to burn off some energy?”

He and I regarded the little ones, who had by this point made it as far as a sofa in the old servants’ parlour. Here they huddled together, wordlessly, impassive, static, each glued to his and her respective phone. 

It occurred to me in a lightning-flash of insight that Jeremy and I were, at that moment, recalling precisely the same thing: those arrivals in Norfolk at the start of long-ago summer holidays, back when Jeremy and Hugo were still at school, where there had scarcely been time for Jenny to bellow a clichéd “and don’t forget to come back in time for dinner!” through an open door before the two boys dashed off across the lawn, over the brook and through the tall shimmering grass of the orchard, in a race to be the first down to the river, or up to the Mound, or whatever the much-discussed goal of choice was to be on that particular occasion. 

There followed a little silence, as if in mutual tribute to something no longer present, perhaps no longer even possible.  

“Yes, let’s go for a walk — what a good idea,” said Jeremy, thrusting his phone back into the pocket of his distinctly American chinos. He put on his best motivational manner. “Come on, guys — it’s time you discovered your ancestral acres! Your forebears have failed to make a living from this land for many, many centuries! Let’s get moving, guys — this’ll be great!”

The twins stared at him blankly. Who could blame them? As I must have told you, Jeremy, having given up first his army job and then his banking job, is now engaged in, of all things, the online English wine trade. So if he’s going to fail to make a living, I rather doubt that the arable fields of north Norfolk ought to bear the full weight of blame.

At any rate, after much searching for sandals, plangent complaints about the wrong sandals, and something approaching a tantrum about a damaged sandal — the sandal in question the compromised pink of old chewing gum, or a livid late-summer sunset, with a cracked plastic buckle — we were ready to set out. 

Here, as you will doubtless be relieved to learn, is where the Scarecrow finally enters this story. 

For in another sub-psychic moment, it occurred to both Jeremy and me simultaneously that either of our time-hallowed welcome-home walks — which is to say, down to the weir, or up to the Mound — might, under the circumstances, prove over-ambitious for the younger members of the party. So instead, by common consent, we found ourselves ambling slowly up the length of Low Lane. 

Have we taken you walking up Low Lane? Probably not. It’s not, in truth, a particularly enticing destination. In fact, it’s hardly more than a farm road, sandwiched between boring fields. It’s narrow enough that a four-by-four can only pass its fellow if one car withdraws, humble and self-abnegating, onto the dry, shattered, rough-mowed earth on either side, almost holding its breath while the other car passes, before bouncing forward again with bad-tempered haste to some far more stimulating destination. No, there is very little to see here. Move along.

For much of its length, Low Lane is hemmed in by hedges. As it rises toward the downland, though, it eventually opens up on one side, offering, as if by way of apology for its general lack of interest, the neat prospect of a nearby village resembling a picture from an old-fashioned children’s book: a view across an arable field, stretching down towards a scatter of paddocks and farm buildings, the proud old church and the sadly over-modernised manor house, along with some rolling land beyond. 

If one makes it as far as the ridge of the hill and strays onto someone else’s property — but the owners are outsiders, they live in Norwich and claim to admire modern architecture, so in their case, a little light trespassing is surely the most venial of rural sins — past the five-bar gate, to where the land rises further still, then on a clear day, ascending an enigmatic bank known as Harrow Hill, one can, on the horizon, see as far as the sullen grey line of the Wash, hectic with waves, windfarms and passing container ships. 

On that hot afternoon, though, as soon as we passed the hedges — Jeremy and I chatting between ourselves and more or less dragging the little ones along in our wake — we were stopped in our tracks by the Scarecrow. 

Well, at least that’s how I remember it. 

“What is man?” enquired Ren. He tugged on his father’s arm and gestured urgently towards the field to the left of us. 

The twins, native Japanese speakers, were, particularly in the earliest days of their visit here, negligent in their use of articles — hence the oddly-worded query. But we saw — or so I assumed — exactly what he meant. 

“That, Ren, is a scarecrow,” I said. “The farmer must have put it in the field to keep our greedy rooks off his crop.” We stood, silently, looking over the five-bar gate. 

I suppose I had better describe the Scarecrow. 

The Scarecrow was the size and shape of an ordinary man. His body was made up of a dirty-white boiler suit, stuffed with straw. His hands were pinkish rubber gloves, similarly stuffed — over-stuffed, really, so that they appeared weirdly distended — bound onto the outstretched arms with twine. His legs, slightly akimbo, were tucked into old wellies. His face was made of sacking, lumpy and distorted, onto which someone had drawn — not very well — the crudest recognisable simulacrum of a human face. 

The Scarecrow’s head, tilted to one side, had been tied onto his body with yet more twine. The effect, alas, gave the impression of someone who’d been hanged or perhaps garrotted, then impaled on a sharpened fence-post.

I winced.

“Not much of a crop,” opined Jeremy. 

This was true. Together, we surveyed the dry earth surrounding that lonesome, unsettling figure. The ground was dotted about — unevenly, unconvincingly, indeed rather poignantly — with a scatter of low vegetation, nondescript and dusty. 

“I wonder what it is? It’s never sugar-beet?”

“No, that’s not beet. It’s …” 

But I wasn’t sure what it was, either. Although the great majority of the field was sown with perfectly ordinary winter wheat — now nearly ripened, although also more than slightly stunted, as were most crops that year — for some reason maybe a quarter of an acre had been planted with this — well, this unsuccessful green thing, whatever it was. 

Kitty, meanwhile, was — rather to my surprise — using her phone to take a photo of the scarecrow. She snapped a shot, prodded the screen with her fat little fingers, and then, holding up the screen for my benefit, barked with delight. “Look! Scary Crow Man!”

“Scarecrow, my darling. Scarecrow.”

“Was the gap in the trees always that big?” asked Jeremy. He was looking back towards our own land, now. The field in question borders our property, separated from it by a row of old beech trees or, where it runs up against the end of the main lawn, by a low hedge. 

“We haven’t lost any trees,” I replied. It was odd, though, because I didn’t remember being able to see the house — our chimneys, even part of the complicated agglomeration of roof-slopes — so clearly from this spot. 

The twins, meanwhile, only had eyes for the scarecrow. They peered through the gate at him, transfixed. It was as though they were waiting for him to do something. 

“Scare-ee Crow Man, Scare-ee Crow Man,” chanted Kitty, at first very quietly, then much louder. Before long, Ren had taken up the chant, too. “Scare-ee Crow Man!” They were jumping up and down, becoming slightly giddy with their own over-tired hilarity, in the way that very tired four-year olds will.  

Jeremy grimaced slightly. He turned away from the field. There was a sort of weary seriousness about him that caught me off guard. “It’s very open, now, that gap,” he said. “Perhaps we ought to do something about it. Has Hugo seen it?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I replied. “Hugo hasn’t really visited for a while.” 

As a distraction, I looked again at the gap. Jeremy was right — the view through to the house was far too open, too unprotected. It had never been like that before.

I had assumed we would trespass our way up to Harrow Hill, from which we could see the sea. At that point, though, poor Kitty managed to cut her plump little toe on a bit of stone, producing a tiny amount of blood accompanied by a disproportionately enormous amount of wailing. The latter, at least, I found oddly upsetting. 

Jeremy scooped her up, showering her with what I assumed to be endearments, expressed in Japanese. She continued to wail, clutching her phone to her chest as if it were her sole consolation left in the world. Reluctantly, we set off back down the hill to the house. 

Only little Ren was stoical. “Gampa” — this, it seemed, was to be the twins’ name for me — “Gampa, can Scary Cow Man come back with us?” He padded alongside me, gazing up at me with vast seriousness of purpose. 

“Scarecrow, darling. Scarecrow. No, the scarecrow had better stay in the field where he belongs. He has important work to do, trying to keep the birds off the crops.”

“But he wants to come with us, Gampa. He told Kitty. It’s okay. He come back with us, yes?”

Something lurched in the pit of my stomach. 

“Come on, Ren, shall we race to that tree? I bet I can get to the tree before you can” — and I ran and I ran, forgetting about my gammy knee, until I was out of breath. 

It was only when I reached the tree — a stunted hawthorn, more a shrub than a tree, really — that I turned around and looked back up the lane, seeing in the distance Jeremy, following on, still with his precious wailing burden cradled in his arms, and behind him, little Ren, striding along purposefully by his father’s side, regarding my exertions with a sort of detached, clinical, slightly pitying curiosity. 

+++

“Sorry I have to go back so soon, Pa,” apologised Jeremy, grimacing at his phone. 

We had only just finished dinner — virtually all of which Jeremy had spent pacing, restlessly, up and down the quarry-tiled corridor that lay beyond the kitchen, remonstrating with some distant, disembodied colleague about a shipment of Sussex-reared fizz that had gone AWOL — and now I was drying the last of the washing up, a vision of domesticity in my apron and damp Marigolds. Jenny’s shade, had she chosen to hang about in that form, would have been amazed.

“Are you sure you can handle the twins?” Jeremy looked at me, with more than a hint of doubt. “Those two can be a bit of a handful at the best of times. I’m not sure that all this travelling about, all these changes in their environment, bring out the best in them, either.” 

“Oh, we’ll be fine,” I assured him. “Remember, I’ve helped raise two children, so young folk are not entirely terra incognita.”

“Yes, I remember,” said Jeremy — who looked as if he were about to say something else, but then thought better of it. “Well, I should only be away until Friday. That’s two nights. That will give me time to sort out this idiotic import thing. It’s just so much better to do that in person than to try to do it remotely. And I can check that the builders aren’t making too much of a mess of the flat, too.

“Two nights, Pa!” he laughed, as much to reassure himself as to reassure me. “How much can go wrong in two nights?”

+++

The twins accepted their father’s sudden departure with equanimity — or so it appeared. 

After Jeremy had kissed them goodbye and I’d gone to the door to wave him farewell, watching the tail-lights of his car disappear down the darkening beech-lined drive until I could see them no longer, I returned to the old servants’ parlour. There, little Kitty and Ren were once again huddled on the big sofa, together yet each self-contained, small round faces illuminated by the eerie light of their phone screens. 

Why did this strike me as so poignant? And yet for a moment I was halted in my approach by the most enormous, urgent, tender, inexplicable pity for these two little souls, left alone on a large sofa, in what I knew, even if they did not, to be a large, unkind, often dangerous world. It was all rather too much like the Babes in the Wood — accompanied, admittedly by the mildly annoying beeping jingle emerging from Ren’s favoured gaming app. 

I pulled myself together. 

“Well, you two, it seems to me remarkably late at night for two young people to still be up and about. Shall we get you ready for bed?”

They looked at me blankly. There were moments where their twinnishness felt less like a biological fact than a defensive strategy. This was one of them. 

“Come on, let’s go upstairs. You’re to have the room that your Papa — Dad — and your uncle had when they were little boys. That’ll be fun, won’t it? Right, now! Avaunt! March!”

Eventually, tired little things that they were, they followed me up the main stairs and into what had once been Jeremy and Hugo’s room — the old night nursery, before the boys both demanded rooms of their own. It was a big room, but low — wedged in under the eaves of the house. A trio of dormer windows looked out across the south lawn, although by that point the lawn was being overtaken, vanishing by the moment under a lapping tide of blue-green shadows. 

The room had, somehow, become the place of final repose for a great deal of historical detritus, ejected by tidy-minded Jenny from other parts of the house. The walls were covered with Jeremy and Hugo’s old house photos and whole-school photos, my own school and Army photos, a few wedding photos, the odd Spy cartoon and a clutch of framed medal groups. In one corner sat my grandmother’s vaguely unnerving invalid chair, which Jeremy and Hugo had once enjoyed racing down the corridors, sometimes right up to the head of the main stairs — in another, a bookshelf filled indifferently with children’s annuals, dog-eared spy thrillers, orders of service from family weddings and funerals, and much-faded folders of my old tax records that wouldn’t quite fit in my office. 

The twins, however, were in no way troubled by any of this. 

With some coaxing, Kitty claimed for herself in the bed nearest the door, while Ren took the bed nearer the wall. We unpacked their things. The little ones had a wash and brushed their teeth, and, more or less competently, changed into the rather odd collection of t-shirts and shorts in which they apparently slept. 

They climbed into their beds. It occurred to me, belatedly, that I knew so little about the practicalities of my grandchildren’s bedtime rituals as to have no idea whether, under normal circumstances, they said prayers. Jeremy and Hugo always had, until they went away to boarding school, at which point Jenny’s and my responsibility for the condition of their immortal souls seemed somehow shared out with strangers, hence diluted, less intense, less urgent.

I suppose I might have asked Kitty and Ren themselves. Four year olds, even in these debased times, surely have the capacity to answer basic questions about their own lives. But as soon as I began to frame the question, a sharp unkind shyness stopped it in my throat. 

What frightened me — the implied rebuke, if the answer was “no”? My own lack of courage? Even now, I’m not certain of the answer. 

So instead I only said, indistinctly, “sweet dreams, my darlings” — realising belatedly that this was, of course, a minor transposition of the words with which Jenny and I had, for so many years, bid each other farewell before departing to our far-distant rooms, located at opposite ends of the rambling first floor.

I turned out the light. Straight away, though, there came a wail — an increasingly familiar wail — so I switched the light on again. Kitty was sitting up in her bed, her perfect little face contorted with outrage. 

“Too much night!” she exclaimed, glaring balefully at me. “Ren can’t have night. Mom say so.” 

I looked enquiringly at Ren, who by now was also sitting up in his bed. He nodded, impassively. “I hate night — dark. At home we have light at night. Mom lets us. It’s okay.” 

I had learned, by that point, that Ren’s “it’s okay” was a diplomatic way of signalling his absolute, non-negotiable if often wholly inexplicable insistence on something. 

Suddenly I, too, felt tired. 

“Oh, very well then, my dears,” I said. “So sorry. Your Papa — Dad — didn’t mention it. I’ll leave the light just as it is, then. Sweet dreams!” 

And away I went, the jingling notes of one of the twins’ games sounding indistinctly behind me, down two flights of stairs, into the service rooms and beyond, through the long corridors and empty spaces of thata old, dark, familiar, yet somehow also tense and expectant house. 

+++

I stayed up too late that night, lying in my bed, leafing through volumes of East Anglian Notes and Queries, neither properly awake nor asleep, half-dreaming a messy amalgam of late Victorian editorial interventions, Anglo-Norman names and unlikely-sounding dialect expressions. When unconsciousness finally arrived, it did so roughly in tandem with the first indefinite suggestions of dawn, visible from the large, uncurtained windows opposite my bed. 

As a result, I slept in far too late. It was almost 9 am when I rose, padding downstairs in my pyjamas and dressing-gown. My intention was to fortify myself with a quick pot of Assam before addressing myself to the state of the twins, my own mental fortitude, and the problem of how I and these alien beings were to occupy ourselves for what seemed an apparently endless two days. 

As I approached the closed kitchen door, however, I heard conversation — or, at least, a conversational little voice, although it was impossible to understand what the voice was saying. 

I turned the Bakelite door handle. The lights were on in the kitchen, although the mild light of a late August morning was also flooding in, puddling on the pammented floor. 

At the kitchen table were seated Kitty and Ren — both still in their night clothes. They were eating breakfast cereal from an odd selection of bowls. I was surprised that they had, albeit in an amateurish way, gone to some effort to set the table, which I was sure I’d left absolutely bare when I’d gone to bed. Now, though, there were table mats, napkins, bowls and spoons — even, I noticed, the cut-crystal tumbler filled with a few late roses that I’d brought in from the garden the morning before, placed centrally on the table, giving the arrangement an air of artless festivity.

I also noted, although not yet entirely awake, that the table had been set, not just for Kitty and the wild-haired Ren, but for a third person, too. 

“Good morning, my darlings! You are early birds indeed — and your grandpa is a lazy old lie-abed laggard, too. Shocking. Very reprehensible. Is this my seat?”

The question, I should add, was entirely rhetorical — the farmhouse chair was already scraping the pamments as I pulled it from the table. This, though, once again prompted a wail of protest. 

“Gampa! No, not there! I make extra table, no, chair, new chair. No, Gampa! Wait.” And with that, Kitty began to bustle, very determined, slightly cross, in a way that once more conjured up the shade of you-know-who. 

“So who sits there, then?” And I indicated the empty seat.

“Starry Cow Man!” replied Kitty, as if this were painfully obvious and, indeed, as if I were an idiot for not realising. 

“She means Scary Crow Man” explained Ren, mouth full, halfway through his bowl of Alpen. 

“The Scarecrow? You mean that awful thing from Carter-Fitzgerald’s field?”

“Starry Cow. My Starry Cow,” said Kitty, affectionately, pulling out the chair to the place she had assigned to me, across the table from the little group of three, rather as if I were destined to be interviewed or interrogated by them. 

“Ah, I see,” I replied, playing along, although I very much didn’t see. “And where is your scarecrow, then? Is he here now?”

“No, silly!” exclaimed Kitty, who had settled herself back in her seat with a mixture of feigned exhaustion and happy complacency. “Starry Cow Man busy with work. He late. But he come soon.”

“Err — how do you know he’s coming soon?”

Kitty, now re-engaged with her bowl of cereal, mutely indicated her mobile phone, which was lying on the table in front of her, face down, its bubblegum-pink case clashing with the old-gold William Morris print of the tablecloth. 

“He send a message,” translated Ren. “It’s okay.” And then, after a little pause, conversationally, while I stared at them both with astonishment, “Gampa, why are there voices in the walls?” 

It turned out, after considerable discussion, that Ren was asking about the sound of the woodpigeons, sometimes extremely audible down the chimneys here, especially first thing in the morning. For that, at least, I had a satisfactory explanation.

+++

I’ll admit, here and now — just between the two of us — that I was unsettled by Kitty’s ridiculous fancy about the Scarecrow. But as far as that went, I hadn’t much liked the Scarecrow himself. 

It’s a funny thing, but I’ve always rather loathed scarecrows. I’ve no idea why. Do you know what I mean, though? There seems to me something unwholesome in taking someone’s actual discarded clothing — gloves, boiler suits, wellies, the like — stuffing it all with straw and pretending that the result is somehow quasi-human — and something even worse about leaving it out in an big open field, through the day and the night, the sun and the rain — expecting this thing you’ve made to stand sentinel, to protect and defend your fields and crops — before ultimately tearing it apart again, or throwing it on a bonfire, as if that would then somehow rid you of the inconvenient thing that you’d carelessly, thoughtlessly created. 

Still, I’m not bonkers! Well, not entirely so. At least not yet. 

I knew, rationally, that Kitty was simply playing a childish game, and Ren joining in. I knew that the Scarecrow was just a concoction of straw, old clothing and the landowner’s whimsical humour. 

I knew the Scarecrow wasn’t going to walk about in the night, creep through the fields until he came to our boundary, crawl across the length of the lawn, before dragging himself, using those awful, pink, swollen, fat-fingered hands, into a first or second-floor bedroom window. That would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it? No, that’s not the sort of thing that would ever cross my mind at all. 

And yet there was something that made me, while the twins were still dawdling over the tail end of breakfast, seek out my ancient Avimo binoculars — left over, as you’ll doubtless remember, from our days in Germany, long before Jeremy and Hugo had arrived on the scene. Next I wandered, casually, to the gap in the trees that we had seen from Low Lane the day before — the now surprisingly wide gap in the beech trees that lay on the boundary dividing my land from the land belonging to old Carter-Fitzgerald. Here, there was a low hawthorn hedge interspersed with sycamore, elm, dog-rose and brambles. Across it, one could look off towards Harrow Hill, the field below it, and —or so I assumed — the Scarecrow.

The hedge itself, by the way, had been the source of decades of bickering between old Carter-Fitzgerald and me. Each year,  without fail, he would promise that his men wouldn’t trim this part of the hedge, which clearly, in law, belonged to me just as much as it did to him — and then, each year, Carter-Fitzgerald’s men “accidentally” butchered it, leaving a raw, ragged, hideous fringe of mutilated twigs for me to look at, until such time as the generosity of springtime cast its spell of green beauty over the scarred, ungainly, ugly branches beneath. This, it seemed, was destined to become one of the most durable of our local village traditions. 

The Scarecrow should have been easily visible with the naked eye — even here in East Anglia, the fields aren’t that big! I had only brought the binoculars so that I could look at the wretched thing more clearly. The idea, I suppose, was to remind myself that the Scarecrow was just that — a scarecrow. Its details might, admittedly, be ghastly, but ultimately it was just a bit of straw, fabric and twine, rammed onto a fence-post and given vaguely human form — nothing more. There was no reason, in other words, for the wretched thing to haunt my waking thoughts, let alone my nightmares. 

A quick glance across the hedge, however, revealed that the Scarecrow was no longer there. 

Believe me, I looked and I looked. Then I rubbed my eyes, and looked again.

Had it fallen down? It had not. Was I looking in the wrong place? I clearly wasn’t, because I could easily see the five-bar gate on which we’d leaned, and all the land separating my own land from that gate. It should have been there. Yet, plainly, it was not. 

No, some other explanation must exist to make sense of what I sought but somehow could not see. 

Carefully, I went through the possibilities. Perhaps, for instance, the Scarecrow had been moved somewhere, overnight, from its rather meaningless role overlooking an unsuccessful and forgotten root crop, to another spot, somehow invisible to me. Perhaps someone had stolen it. Perhaps someone who disliked it as much as I did had spirited it away.  

Admittedly, none of these possibilities seemed very likely. 

Still, it was here that my mental processes stopped — here amid these mildly unconvincing, unsatisfying alternatives — because, put simply, any other explanation would, at that point, have been so much worse, at every possible sort of level. 

+++

 With hindsight, we should have gone away somewhere for the day — up to the beach at Holkham, for instance, where we could have walked for miles in search of the elusive, shimmering, ever-retreating sea, refreshed ourselves with minute measures of overpriced ice cream in neat little cardboard cups, and wondered at the incessant whispering of those holm oaks lining Lady Anne’s Drive, their leaves the dull sullen green of patinated bronze, the log narrow corridor created by their arching branches oddly enclosed, somehow claustrophobic, as if hiding something. 

The weather, though, was changing. The day before had been hot, still and airless. Overnight, however, something had begun to shift, so that by the morning, the wind was ruffling the tops of the beeches along the drive. There was a chill in the air that, if not in itself autumnal, provided a brisk reminder that summer could not last forever. 

As if in token of this, clouds began to drift up from the southwest, first one by one, later clumping and crowding together, blotting out the blue of the sky. 

Vague memories of other, earlier seaside excursions drifted back to me. On reflection, the prospect of being stuck in a car with two volatile, possibly damp, certainly sand-caked and hungry children in the midst of a downpour — with a ratio of one adult driver to two unmoored infants — had limited appeal. No, it was, surely, a better idea to stay close to home. 

The problem, it soon transpired, was that the twins had no idea of how to occupy themselves, other than in looking at their phones. Once washed, dressed and redeployed in the old servants’ parlour, they merely returned to their now-habitual place on the sofa, prodding at their screens with plump little fingers, as two competing, equally annoying electronic tunes pinged away in the background. 

The twins resisted, politely but firmly, all attempts at small talk. 

It seemed to me — suddenly overwhelmed with a Jenny-grade strand of furious censoriousness —  as if the twins were totally unaware that the outside world existed, let alone that it might be a desirable place in which to sojourn. It simply didn’t occur to them — or so it appeared — either to explore a large, unfamiliar, in some ways surely interesting house, nor indeed to go outside. I wondered at their culpable lack of imagination, the limitations of their inner worlds.

 Could this total failure of enterprise have been the result of an exclusively urban upbringing, I wondered? Or did it, worse still, expose some more profound defect of our times, a self-inflicted myopia granting the two-dimensional representation of things a higher priority, a greater consequence than the three-dimensional reality of those things themselves?

It wasn’t like that in our day, was it? Not even when Jeremy and Hugo were growing up — despite the fact that by then, the rot of television, video games and all their concomitant horrors had already very much set in. 

Jeremy and Hugo, at least, used to try to dam up the little brook at the edge of the lawn, play hide-and-seek around the grounds, or disappear on miscellaneous adventures about which we — Jenny and I — heard little, and worried even less. 

For Kitty and Ren, though, there seemed to be nothing much to life beyond whatever went on within their phones. I found myself preparing, in my mind, a moderately intelligent reference to Plato’s cave, before remembering that there was no one about — not Jenny, not Jeremy, no one at all — to whom I could possibly address it. 

Instead, fortified with an Emma Bridgewater mug of very strong Assam, I went to the French doors — yet another of Jenny’s innovations, these — that led out onto the lawn. I opened the doors. The wind, which really had come up a lot in the last few hours, whipped at these, almost as if trying to slam them closed again, as I struggled to keep them open without spilling my tea. 

This drama had, at least, the merit of catching the twins’ attention. 

First of all they both regarded me with a level of impassiveness that, after it had been held for a few seconds, shaded into something terribly like solemnity. It was as if they, somehow older than the ages, had cause to reflect, in that moment, upon the absolute depths of human folly. Something both wise and sorrowful fluttered across those beautiful dark eyes, those flawless faces, those delicate, perfect little hands, arrested suddenly mid-movement. And then, very slowly, in a sort of duet, they both began to laugh.

“Gampa fights door! Bang, pow, woosh!” narrated Ren, amid loud giggles, while Kitty mimed my attempts to stop the doors from slamming shut. 

“Well, come outside, then, both of you, while I can still keep these wretched things open! Come on — now!”

Out they came, phones firmly clutched in their tiny hands. 

Once on the lawn — under a dull grey sky, the sharp breeze dancing through the late August wreckage of the borders, scattering the sweetly putrescent petals from the last of the roses, rattling bronze leaves from the draught-stricken beech trees — the twins stood together, once again solemn and impassive, but also looking very small. 

They looked around them. Strange to say, it did not seem to occur to them that they might examine the fountain, nor the brook that forms the margin to one side of the lawn, nor see what lay behind the yew hedges, nor even clamber onto the fallen tree that still reposed out in the pasture, gigantic yet abject, sprawling victim of last year’s gales. The cat-like mewing of a buzzard in the pine wood left them unmoved, as did the sharp bark of a young muntjac deer. 

There were blackberries ripening in the hedges, so much so that the canes sagged beneath their weight — but the twins did not think to look at them, let alone sample them. Indeed, when I tried to suggest to them that such a thing might be possible — that one could pick a sweet fruit from a bush, then simply eat it — they gazed upon me with a sort of fathomless pity. When I offered a blackberry to Kitty, she simply shook her head at me, then averted her eyes. 

Kitty, somehow, had inherited Jenny’s ability to make me feel as if I were in the wrong, even when I clearly wasn’t. This did not seem a particularly rewarding inheritance.

No, nothing seemed to appeal to the twins. Did they want to look at the hens, in the walled garden? They did not. How about trying to find Jeremy and Hugo’s old bicycles, squirrelled away somewhere in the barn? Would that be fun? Alas, the only reply was a sorrowful shaking of heads. 

Finally, in desperation, I stumbled upon a topic that interested them. I asked them whether they wanted to go on another walk — “like the one we did yesterday, with your Pa — err, Dad.” Something — God only knows what — then prompted me to explain this concept further. “You know, the walk where we went up Low Lane, and ran into that ghastly scarecrow.”

This caught the twins’ attention.

“Stray Cold Man not in field now,” said Kitty. “Not now.”

This, I have to admit, floored me. Of course I remembered, from breakfast, the twins’ thesis the the Scarecrow was somehow coming to visit them, that he would be with us all soon. 

Could they really, though, have known that he was no longer to be seen in the field where he had been yesterday? And if so, how could they possibly know that? 

They had not been anywhere near the field boundary that day. I was sure of that. The field wasn’t remotely visible from the upstairs rooms, not even the old night nursery. The sightlines didn’t work.

 There was literally no way they could be sure of what they were saying. And yet they did, somehow, seem so sure of themselves — so confident. They knew that the Scarecrow was no longer in his field.

The wind, busy and purposeful, tugged a pewter-grey cloud across the sun, bringing a sudden chill to the bleached-out lawn. I shivered. 

Some hint of all of this must have have been evident from my face, because at that point, Ren added, by way of confirmation, “Starry Corn Man never there in field ever again. No, never.”

I took a deep breath, and tried to hold my nerve. 

“How did you find out about the Scarecrow, Ren? How do you know he isn’t in the field? And if he isn’t there, then where is he?”

“Slay God Man is busy, he has to do work — he is very, very, very busy now — but then he comes home. He is coming home soon!”

“Starry Cow tells me on phone,” confirmed Kitty. “Soon!” 

Gaily, Kitty waved her phone at me, so that I could see the screen — but all the characters were in Japanese, which of course I cannot read, and anyway, what she showed me simply looked like some sort of random cartoon or game, a mess of big eyes and over-emphatic colours and cute animals, nothing to do with a scarecrow at all.

I tried again. “Where is he now, though? Where is the Scarecrow?” 

Was there a tremor in my voice? Surely not! Any rate, whether there was or not, the twins simply laughed at me. 

“Don’t worry, Gampa.” 

This was Ren, looking at me with the eyes of Jeremy. His extreme reasonableness felt like a reproach to the obscure sense of panic that, sure as the wind from the south or the signs and portents of autumn blowing in with it, was beginning to work its way into everything. 

“Don’t worry, Gampa. Stormy Cloud Man is very, very busy now, but he not far, he is near. Maybe he comes in dark? He wants to live in house, he wants dinner, he wants friend, maybe? He is near. He maybe friend. Don’t worry, Gampa. It’s okay.”

+++

The rest of the day passed with a sort of superficial normalcy, punctuated here and there with very odd moments. 

Kitty insisted, when we had lunch — a picnic on the lawn, despite the slightly discouraging weather, as I was still determined to get the little ones out into the fresh air — on setting a place for the Scarecrow, who was apparently — for here she dissented slightly from Ren’s view — very nearby indeed now, might in fact arrive at any moment. 

The Scarecrow, it transpired, required his own cheese sandwich, glass of fruit squash, and several biscuits, selected with care by Kitty herself. His failure to arrive before the end of the meal necessitated that I should eat the sandwich. The biscuits and squash were consumed, with quasi-sacramental formality, by the entire gathered company, as per Kitty’s insistence. 

Observing the twins, I noted that in matters of ritual propriety, Ren deferred to Kitty, although when it came explaining what was required, Ren, whose spoken English was more confident than Kitty’s, especially at the start, often took the lead. Left to themselves, they either spoke in Japanese or seemed, as twins will, to communicate telepathically. 

Despite all this, we might well, out of sheer desperation, have gone for another walk that grey afternoon, had there not been a number of interruptions. 

The first was a visit from one of our more satisfactory neighbours. Roddy had once held a role that remained enshrined in village lore as “government scientist”, whatever that might be. Now into his 90s, he remained red-cheeked, lucid and, as they always insist old people must be, “active”. Jenny had dismissed him as a bore. I liked him.

He turned up brandishing a case containing a power drill, which he returned to me with a dignified bow. “Jolly good, this! Absolutely the thing. Thanks so much for lending it. It was absolutely the thing I needed.”

I expressed pleasure that the power drill had fulfilled Roddy’s requirements and, as I knew I must, asked him in for a cup of tea. 

For while Roddy was active — a stalwart of the PCC, a bastion of the trust that championed the purity of the local chalk stream, objector to bad planning proposals, supporter of good causes, now and then dragged back into the foretaste of purgatory that is the parish council, before he managed to resign again — he was also, it must be said, rather lonely. His wife — a sweet-natured woman, dismissed by Jenny as “boring” but in fact courageous and kind, whose exit from this life was a gradual one, played out over many painful years — had been gone for almost a decade. They had no children. So one of the ways in which Roddy maintained his activity levels was through the practice of borrowing random items, retaining them for a while, and then returning them. In this sense, I suppose, my power drill, which I  hadn’t used for years and I was pretty certain didn’t have its charger with it, had nonetheless done the job for which it was intended. 

We drank our tea at the table in the walled garden — it was too windy now for the leaf-swept lawn — under intermittently leaden skies. A quartet of red hens scratched about in the dry dust near our feet. The twins, struck with postprandial quiescence, reclined on a bench by the south-facing wall, leaning heavily against each other, sleepy, once again playing games on their phones. This time, though, I have no recollection, of hearing any noise — or, rather, only the soft, confidential clucking of the hens, punctuated by the odd shriek when one of them, in a fit of hierarchical zeal, took a peck at the other’s neck. The last butterflies of summer hovered uncertainly, keeping their distance. 

Roddy’s thin, blue-veined fingers enfolded the mug on the table before him. “Yes,” he agreed. “It’s true, you know. When I was driving up from Dereham the other day, along the Low Road, I noticed that I could see your house between the trees. Never used to be like that, did it? Never remember being able to see your house from the road at all, never in all my years here. And I can’t think why, if it’s right that you haven’t lost any trees. Odd business. Very rum.”

“Rum indeed, Roddy. Jenny used to be obsessed with that, you know — not wanting our place to be seen from the road. She thought it was vulgar. I can only imagine that something must have changed about the hedge. Carter-Fitzgerald’s men are completely out of control when it comes to trimming, or rather mutilating, other people’s hedges —”

“I remember, you’ve had problems with that before, hadn’t you? I’m sure you told me —”

“Yes, exactly! Exactly that. Quite right. So I can only imagine that they’ve somehow trimmed something back, because we haven’t lost any trees, or felled any, and it never used to be that way, because Jenny would have had an absolute fit about it, I can tell you that! And then there’s that scarecrow —”

“Scarecrow? Where, on your land?”

“No, Roddy — on Carter-Fitzgerald’s land, just below Harrow Hill. He’s got a scarecrow there — or rather he had a scarecrow there. He seems to have removed it now. Or maybe his men removed it? Vile old thing, anyway. Awful head made of sacking. Awful hands, too. I can’t think why he put it there.”

“On his land?”

“Yes, Roddy — Carter-Fitzgerald. On his land. You must have seen it, in fact, when you were driving back from Dereham on the Low Road, because if you could see our house, you could see the Scarecrow, too — that’s just where it was.”

“On Carter-Fitzgerald’s land, in the field? Sorry, old man — I didn’t see a scarecrow at all. His men must have moved it.”

“But when were you driving by, though, Roddy? When did you notice the gap in our trees?”

“Oh, it would have been Tuesday, because I had to see Magnus over at Top Farm about his gazebo — whether I could borrow it. He’s got a gazebo, did you know that? British racing green. Clever thing, only takes two men to put it up, too! And then to take it down again, of course. And it fits in a bag, like golf clubs, only a bit bigger, because it’s a full-sized gazebo. So clever!”

“Tuesday? That was two days ago, then. And you’re sure there was no scarecrow there in the field, Roddy? Not in Carter-Fitzgerald’s field, right in your line of sight if you were looking towards our place here?”

“Sorry, old man, can’t help you there, I’m afraid — no scarecrow at all. But if you wanted one, of course, I could keep a look out for you —”

“No! The last thing I want is a scarecrow. Horrid things. Unnecessary. No, no scarecrows! Positively not!”

“Steady on, old man,” replied Roddy, kindly, noting that my hands were clutched on the arms of my chair, my voice was trembling and that the twins, who had perhaps been having a nap, were gazing curiously in our direction. “No worries! I only wondered, because I’m pretty sure I could find you one if you needed it. Easier than a gazebo, you know! Pretty sure, if you needed it, I borrow one for you somewhere.”

+++

The next interruption was my own fault. I had forgotten that this was, as it has been known in our family for years, “Mrs Goody’s day”. 

Alma Goody is a living relic of the days when Jenny still managed our household affairs. No longer in the first flush of youth — let us be frank; she is actually now both ever-so-slightly blind, and increasingly forgetful — it is, of course, entirely impossible to let her go, so habitual have her Friday visits become. 

Yet as the years have passed, her ambit of responsibilities has diminished in keeping with her abilities, so what once entailed actually cleaning the house — including, in decades past, readying rooms for visitors, cooking meals, changing over loose covers and sorting out the coal delivery — has now contracted into a ritual whereby she runs a grimy cloth over a few surfaces, misplaces the cleaning products, absent-mindedly flips switches that might or might not relate to the chest freezer or the electric Aga, leaves the front door open, loses the key to the post box, and then settles down with me in the kitchen for a lengthy, mutually enjoyable discussion of the defects, real and imagined, of the many inhabitants of our village, living and dead, over multiple cups of tea. 

While Roddy was glad to drink his tea from a stained Emma Bridgewater mug, Mrs Goody insists on using my mother’s Crown Derby, complete with an Imari plate for the biscuits.

Occasionally, these days, she forgets that Jenny — to whom she was and is unstintingly, ferociously loyal — has died. That, too, has a sort of soothing quality, once one gets used to it. 

Mrs Goody was introduced to the twins. “My, you look very Japanese, you two!” she said, fondly. “My father, you know, was with the Royal Norfolks at the Fall of Singapore. He worked on the Burma Railway, he did. When he came back he wasn’t half addled in the head. Never could abide Japanese after that, my old father. My mum always said that’s why he turned to the drink, although of course he weren’t as bad a some I could mention! Terrible folk, the Japanese! Not human. Still, all of that were in the past. All best forgotten, don’t you think? What funny little souls you two are. Here, you’ll want a biscuit, won’t you?” 

And so the twins each, shyly, accepted a biscuit with a formal little nod of thanks, which they proceeded to eat, gratefully, before accepting another. After this, they retired to the old servants’ parlour — or so, at least, I assumed. The more or less incessant jingling of their phones had, by that time, entirely ceased to register. 

After exchanging intelligence regarding the new couple who had taken the Old Forge (both male, apparently), the new vicar (insufficiently keen on the Prayer Book for Mrs Goody’s exacting standards, although to be frank, on this point I was inclined to agree), the scandalous story explain why the village shop no longer stocked sausages from a well-known local butcher, and whether old Carter-Fitzgerald’s nephew was really in prison for drug-related offences or just simple thieving, I managed to manoeuvre the conversation around to the subject of scarecrows — not that I was at all preoccupied, obviously, but I felt that it would be interesting to hear her views.

“Carter-Fitzgerald!” I exclaimed. “That man is mad. Do you know what he’s done now? He’s put a scarecrow up in the field just below Harrow Hill. Have you seen it? Horrid old thing, made up of rubber gloves and an old grain sack and a boiler suit and heaven knows what. And yet there’s not even any sort of proper crop there, so what’s he playing at?”

Mrs Goody simply looked at me blankly. “Scarecrow? I know there’s a scarecrow festival over at Wighton, or is it Warham? Cain’t never tell those two apart, somehow — I must ask my daughter. But I ain’t seen no scarecrows hereabouts.”

“You know that field, south of us, just below Harrow Hill? Just up the Low Road? That’s the one I mean. There.”

“Oh no sir, I can’t say that I’ve seen no scarecrow there, not now nor never, come to think on it. And I pass that way regular, too — I came that way this morning, in fact, because Millie had to look in on her alpacas.”

“Ah, I must be confused, then,” I admitted. 

“Don’t you worry, sir, it happens to the best of us,” said Mrs Goody, absent-mindedly dunking a totally imaginary biscuit into her empty cup of tea. She then asked me, for the second time, to please remember to send her apologies to Jenny for failing to get round, today, to doing the windows in the conservatory — a pleasant enough old 1930s room that Jenny had, in fact, insisted on having demolished back in 1990 or thereabouts. 

I promised Mrs Goody, politely, that I would. 

+++

Finally, there was a visit — an unusual event, this — from old Caspar Carter-Fitzgerald himself. 

Carter-Fitzgerald and I have an enduringly awkward relationship. As you know, my property — which has been in my family’s hands for centuries — abuts his own, much larger holding in several places. His family has been in the village only since the 1950s but he has, elsewhere, aristocratic connections, so puts on “lord of the manor” airs not entirely becoming to his station in life, if one’s allowed to say that sort of thing these days. We have known each other since infancy, and never much liked each other, and yet life has continued, insistently, to ensure that our paths, like our landholdings, overlap. 

Carter-Fitzgerald appeared mid-afternoon in front of our house in his remarkable vehicle, which seemed to consist, chimera-like, of parts of other vehicles loosely affixed to each other, some of these visibly held together with gaffer tape. I rather doubted that the whole thing was MOT-worthy, but perhaps he felt it was safe to drive it on his own land — even that the village was, in some sense, all his own land, even though it very clearly was not. 

He spoke with an affected drawl, addressing me, in tones laced with irony, as “Colonel”, and — once he had lifted himself out of his vehicle, which appeared to be filled with dogs, bales of hay, and shotguns — revealed himself to be wearing what must once have been a good very Jermyn Street shirt, now with a large rip down one sleeve, revealing an old man’s sunburnt elbow and forearm. It occurred to me that, paradoxically, Carter-Fitzgerald’s scarecrow was rather better turned out than he was. 

Carter-Fitzgerald complained, conversationally, about the state of our beech trees and a non-functioning gate at the far end of our meadow — neither of which were any of his business, actually — before coming to the point of his visit. There was to be a charity dinner in honour of his late wife, raising funds for a cause that had been particularly dear to her — music tuition at the local infant school. Not looking at me, he passed me an invitation card, before changing the subject to a particularly noxious planning application that we both, like everyone else in the village, rightly deplored. 

We both knew that I would attend the dinner, bid in the charity auction, buy tickets for the raffle — that literally no other outcome was conceivable, this being the nature of our relationship, past and present, as it had been, ceteris paribus, the nature of our fathers’ relationship, and would probably also be the relationship of whichever of our various sons ended up there in the village in decades to come. 

I could, of course, have asked Carter-Fitzgerald about the scarecrow. The field it was in was his field. He, perhaps alone amongst all people on earth, could have given me a credible explanation of what it was, why it was there — why it had ceased to be there — even, whether it had ever existed at all. 

But again, as with the twins’ bed-time prayers the night before, something stopped the question in my throat, even as I started to utter it. 

Why was this? Was it the near-certainty of some facetious, mocking, playfully inaccurate reply? 

Probably so. This was a Carter-Fitzgerald trait that had always annoyed me. Surely, after all these decades, we could speak plainly to each other? Yet here I, too, was somehow unable to speak plainly. It was all very odd. Why were we like that? Did we have to be like that?

“Yes, of course I’ll be there,” I said, suddenly, rather to my own surprise. “What a very good idea. Well done for organising it. Katie would have loved it.”

“Fucking stupid old bitch. Come here, Poppy!” One of his spaniels had got out of the vehicle and was proceeding to poo liberally amongst the rosemary bushes right in front of the house. “Sorry, Colonel. Fucking stupid animal. Gaga. Ought to have her put down, really.” 

With a rough tug at her collar, he pulled the spaniel back into the car. But as he did so, I could see that he was, all too obviously, wiping tears from his eyes.

+++

Dinner was uneventful. You may be amazed to learn that since Jenny’s death, I’ve become a reasonably competent cook — as long as there’s a recipe, not too many ingredients, nothing fiddly, nothing foreign and nothing fancy! Grilled chops, steak, sausages — that sort of thing. No roasts, alas, because I never manage to get through one of those alone. Jeremy, though, had insisted that for the twins, pasta was probably the sounder option. So spag boll it was, with peas alongside, freshly harvested from the depths of the chest freezer. 

This proved a success. Once again, however, a place had to be set for the Scarecrow. At one point, Kitty — who had asked for seconds, much to my unfeigned delight — opined that the Scarecrow would, when he arrived, find the spaghetti very hard to eat. 

“But why, my darling? Can’t the Scarecrow just slurp it up the way you two little gannets do?”

“Silly! He not have mouth!  Also, too big fat hands. Poor Starvy Coat!”

Later, I wondered whether I should have put my foot down about this Scarecrow game. Was I over-indulgent, letting Kitty put out a fork and knife and table-mat for her imaginary friend — serving him a little bowl of ice-cream, later surreptitiously consumed, when I was briefly out of the room, by a riotously giggling Ren? 

Should I have told them that this was all nonsense? Should I have told them that the Scarecrow was, at best, just a scarecrow, and certainly not there with us, in the old panelled dining room, under second-rate portraits of eighteenth century squires and their wives, gazing down upon us, their descendants, with a bemused, patient, all-comprehending tolerance?

Jenny had, of course, always claimed that I spoiled our own twins, Jeremy and Hugo, which was why they had turned out so badly. Neither had a proper career, neither had made a brilliant match. Even Jeremy, who at least had eventually settled down with Mai, had taken his time about starting a family. 

At the time, this had seemed unfair to me. Jeremy and Hugo were, surely, for all their faults, kind-hearted, decent, sensible young men — useful in a crisis, very good company, all that sort of thing. 

“Yes,” Jenny would protest — “just like you. The problem is that they don’t actually do anything!” 

We were, in final analysis, all failures in her eyes. And then — well, she died, didn’t she? Yet here we all are, eating spag boll, contending with phantom scarecrows, getting on with life. It’s a funny old world, really, when one stops to contemplate it. 

+++

After dinner, as the twins retired to the old servants’ parlour and my thoughts drifted randomly over the washing up, something else occurred to me. 

I remembered, belatedly, that when we had first seen the Scarecrow — the only time we had seen the Scarecrow, strictly speaking, unless in fact we had never seen him at all — Kitty had taken a photo on him. Did that photo still exist? If so, it would at least prove that, contrary to the considered view of everyone else, the Scarecrow wasn’t just some figment of a very few, possibly closely interconnected imaginations.

It was easy to ask Kitty about this, as she took photos almost constantly. She did so as freely, unthinkingly and naturally as she breathed. A chair leg, cloud, electrical socket, paving stone, her brother’s ear — all these, and much else besides, fell within the ambit of Kitty’s photographic attentions. Why she did this, what she intended to do with the photos, whether she did anything with them at all — such points were much less clear. In this case, however, the photo might at least to document something unknowable. 

Indeed, when I came back into the old servants’ parlour after washing up, contemplating this topic, Kitty was in the act of snapping a photo of her own tiny foot, clad in those grubby pink pleastic sandals. The virtual shutter elicited its slick, definitive, yet not entirely convincing click. Kitty peered at the screen, regarded the result, and turned away, looking satisfied. 

“May I look, Kitty?”

The little girl held her screen so that I could admire an oddly-framed photo of part of a human foot, only slightly blurred. “Enchanting!” I exclaimed. “Really nicely done. I’ve seen worse at the ICA. Much worse, actually! You really are clever, you know.”

“Yes” replied Kitty, politely. “Yes.”

“Kitty, do you remember the other day, when we walked up Low Lane — the first time we saw your friend the Scarecrow? You took a photo of him then, didn’t you? I’d love to see that, you know. I bet that’s a brilliant photo.”

“Yes” said Kitty, looking carefully at her sandal and comparing it with the photo. 

“Could you show me that photo, Kitty? Please?”

“Why?”

“Just because I imagine it’s a wonderful photo, that’s all. Could I see it, please?”

Kitty began to scroll, aimlessly, on her phone, but, stealing a glance over her shoulder, I could see that she wasn’t even looking through her photos. I must have expressed some sort of visible annoyance because, a moment later, with a rather theatrical sigh, Ren leaned across, extracted Kitty’s phone from her and, while she clambered to retrieve it, he managed to find the Scarecrow photo, which he held up and showed to me. 

Well, at least it might have been the Scarecrow photo. Kitty must have been moving quite quickly when she took it, though, as the result was an out-of-focus, smeary, inchoate blur of white, pink and a sort of grubby beige, swirling in front of what might, with the eye of faith, been our very distant field boundary. Or, well — it might have been a thousand other things besides, too. Whatever else it might have been, anyway, it was hardly convincing evidence of the Scarecrow’s objective existence.

It was, however, as if Kitty could hear my thoughts, because she was very quick off the mark with her excuses. “Scaly Claw Man move too fast, Gampa,” she explained. “Already run!”

+++

With hindsight, trying to play hide-and-seek with only three people, two of them tiny, in a decent-sized house, was clearly a tactical mistake. But at the time, it seemed a reasonable way to pass the hours between dinner and bedtime. Also, I was determined, still, to encourage the twins to discover the world beyond their phones. Perhaps I even wanted, for obscure and probably atavistic reasons, to start to make the house truly theirs, as it was mine, and also Jeremy’s and Hugo’s house. How better to do this than to encourage the twins to lose themselves in it? 

You know this place as well as I do. Yes, it’s ugly! Well, it’s a mongrel. No one in this family has ever been obsessed with architectural purity. We’re practical people —also, we never have any cash! So we rarely demolish anything — it takes someone like Jenny to do that — we just add a little wing here, another outbuilding there, but mostly leave well enough alone. 

The result is inelegant. Pagets is, for instance, very unlike Carter-Fitzgerald’s Hall, for instance, a Palladian pocket masterpiece that finds its way into all those big coffee table “English Country House” books, and is continually booked out for photo shoots and ever-so-slightly vulgar yet lucrative wedding receptions. 

Despite this, though, Pagets is, at least, the story of our family in lapidary form. It’s a record, warts-and-all, of all the ups and downs, the quirks and foibles, the flaws and moral defects of generations of my forebears. All this is why I, personally, wouldn’t change it for the world, and why I shall never leave it — until the time comes to carry me out feet first. But being serious for a moment, it’s also why I wanted the twins to start to treat it as their own, which is what it will, in due course, God willing, become. Hence, however obliquely, the game of hide and seek. 

The twins were, thankfully, already familiar with the basic outlines of the game. Also, we established — or so I assumed — some eminently sensible limits. 

The garden, outbuildings, cellars and the more dangerous attic rooms were all firmly out of bounds. That left the ground floor with its grand reception rooms and lowly service rooms, the first floor with its variously furnished bedrooms, and perhaps half of the second floor, where the twins’ night nursery was located. 

The kitchen table was, we decided, HQ, “home base”, or whatever one calls it these days. Inevitably, the twins were the quarry, whereas I was tasked with finding them. 

So it was that, at about 7 pm, I sat down at the newly-scrubbed pine table, covered my eyes, and began to count, loudly and slowly, to sixty. I didn’t hear a sound — not even a suppressed giggle or the sound of tiny feet, let alone evidence of a phone — but when I uncovered my eyes again, the twins had extracted themselves from the room. 

The hunt had begun.

I started, obviously, with a quick sweep around the ground floor. The effect of this, incidentally — which I note only because it would turn out to matter later — was to make me very aware of which doors were open, versus which were firmly shut. In my experience of hide and seek, younger players in particular rarely have the wit to close a door behind them — and when they do, the result is usually audible. But there was, as far as I could see, no one either in the hall, the tall and stately drawing room, the spag boll-scented dining room, the day room with its wide windows and views across the lawn, nor indeed in any of the little inconsequential rooms attached to the long central corridor of the service range. 

Up the main stairs I went, reflecting how incredibly loud one’s own steps sound, striking the stone underfoot — how loud even one’s own breathing is — when one’s listening out for the faintest hint of someone else’s presence.

 I paused for a moment at the top of the main stairs. From there, as you’ll remember, the main bedrooms are laid out along two back-to-back corridors. The older rooms faced out towards the walled garden — the newer and rather grander ones, towards the big lawn. It was still, at that point, broad daylight outside. The wind was still blowing, which complicated the business of listening for movement. The portraits on the stairs gazed at me blandly, uninterested in the choices that lay before me. 

I approached the whole question methodically. The twins, I reasoned, would know this floor far less well than either of the others. They had, by now, spent plenty of time in the kitchen, old servants’ parlour, the dining room and the hall. They would also know the second floor, where their own night nursery lay. 

The first floor, in contrast, was terra incognita. It seemed unlikely to me that they would default to hiding in rooms about which they knew nothing — rooms with closed doors, rooms that might, for all they knew, contain anything or nothing. It was for that reason, then, that I at first ignored the first floor, and went up into the attics. 

 The twins were not, however, in the night nursery, which by now they had made very much their own, strewn as it was with their suitcases, clothing, a soft toy or two, charging cables and travel adaptors. I strayed over towards one of the windows, when some sort of movement out on the lawn caught my eye. Was it something blowing along in the wind? It must have been, because when I rushed to the glass to try to see what it was, alles in ordnung — there was nothing moving on the lawn at all, no one there, nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever. 

 I had a look around the rest of the second floor — the old day nursery, the room that used to be Jenny’s studio before she was too ill to work there any more, a couple of rooms full of miscellaneous and half-forgotten clutter — rooms which were, in effect, the unexamined and sometimes embarassing subconscious of the house — but it was very evident that the twins were nowhere to be found. 

By now, I must have been searching for a good twenty minutes, although it felt like much longer. 

At that point I retraced my steps and descended the main stairs to the first floor. Perhaps the twins were hiding in the bedrooms after all. Well, the only solution was to go through these rooms, patiently and carefully, one by one. This was the sensible thing to do.

I started with my own bedroom, which was in the old part of the house — hence the low ceiling, small casement windows, rolling floor, and inelegant proportions. How Jenny disliked these rooms! She held in particularly contempt what she called my “clutter” — books, folders, very bad pictures kept for sentimental reasons, saggy old armchairs that I happen to find comfortable, a chewed-over dog-basket related to terrier who died, admittedly after a respectable very innings, more than twenty years ago. No twins, however, were apparent amongst the clutter. 

The next room to search was my office. My desk, typewriter, shelves sagging with bound volumes of various antiquarian journals, folders of tedious admin, filing cabinets stuffed with the detritus of the boys’ school and university fees, tax affairs and the whole epic, unhappy enterprise of dealing with Jenny’s death and burial — these were all as they ought to be. A cursory glance revealed, once again, no twins whatsoever. 

Down in the walled garden, visible from a window, the hens were busy with scratching up a late supper. They were conscious, perhaps more so than I was, of how soon the sun would set.

I continued my progress along the older rooms of the first floor. There followed a series of guest bedrooms, more or less neglected, according to accidents of history, taste and Mrs Goody’s inscrutable whims. The twins were present in none of them.

So it was that I doubled back once more, to search the only rooms I’d not yet examined — the bedrooms that faced out towards the rapidly darkening lawn. 

First came Jeremy’s room. Jeremy had, the day before, got as far as unpacking a few of his things — left some shoes lying about, thrown a jacket over a chair, abandoned a folded copy of the FT on the now-rumpled bed, left an empty Starbucks cup in his rubbish bin, that sort of thing — and in doing so, somehow broken the spell that suspended the place in time. 

In other respects it was still, however, very much a shrine to the latter days of Jeremy’s boyhood. Here were posters commemorating an earlier generation of Norwich City luminaries (a downmarket enthusiasm for association football being one of the very minor acts of rebellion which our sweet-natured Jeremy ever managed to inflict upon Jenny, although in fairness, she more than rose to the bait), piles of CDs, heaps of fat interchangeable paperback, most of which promised vivid insights into the worlds of the SAS, Commandos and Paras. 

As with the other rooms, this one showed no signs of having been visited by the twins. Was there something, though, brushing against the window? But when I rushed to the window, heart thudding, to find the source of that scraping noise, it was nothing but a spray of jasmine bobbing frantically in the wind, bumping up against the old glass. 

The room next to Jeremy’s room was one of the smarter guest bedrooms — you’ve slept in that one, haven’t you? It harboured no evident twins. 

As you’ll perhaps remember, the room next to that one belongs to Hugo, although, at that point, it must have been a good five or six years since he’d spent the night in it. This did not, however, prevent it from reflecting, assertively, Hugo’s distinctive personality. 

Perhaps because they were twins, albeit non-identical in the obvious as well as the non-obvious ways, Hugo had, since babyhood, made it his life’s work to distinguish himself from Jeremy. Or that, at least, is the inference that Jenny and I both drew from many of Hugo’s escapades and style choices.

On one exeat, for instance, he had taken it upon himself to redecorate the walls of his room — papered, at Jenny’s instigation, in a tasteful heritage pattern — with Dulux exterior paint, jet black and very glossy. Later, Jenny had removed some of his more outré poster selections on the grounds — possibly even true — that they unsettled Mrs Goody. Neatly arranged in a bookcase next to his bed I spotted, inter alia, works by Ezra Pound, Nabokov, Anthony Burgess, Brett Easton Ellis, Yukio Mishima — and, all in their correct order, a run of old Tintin books. 

Years ago, Hugo had rescued an old gramophone from the attic, along with some ancient 78s that belong to my grandparents. Those were still there — as were a couple of theatre scripts, much annotated. Hugo’s curtains — worn gold brocade, again, foraged from somewhere in the attic — were still tightly closed. I didn’t have the heart to open them. No, I thought, this was not a likely haven for fugitive twins. 

And that, of course, left only one possible room — Jenny’s room. 

Why didn’t I just go downstairs at that point? The “game” — if one could still call it that — had been going on for far too long now, so that it had mutated, surely, into something else altogether. 

But on the other hand, I’ve always had a methodical way of doing things — it’s seen me right in many a crisis, as you possibly remember — and I wasn’t going to abandon it now. So, taking a deep breath, steeling myself for the lurch I knew my stomach was going to take, I turned the handle to what had once been — to what, at some level, still very much was — Jenny’s room.

Jenny had, characteristically, chosen for herself the biggest bedroom in the house. Like all the rooms along this corridor, it dated from the 1750s. Unlike the other bedrooms, however, Jenny’s room was, in effect, a double room. What’s more, because it was a corner room, it looked out not only over the lawn, but also down towards the little brook, the beech trees, the orchard, and the distant low hills beyond. 

It had been my parents’ room, but once it was hers, Jenny had banished all memory of their artless, tasteless accumulation of furniture, pictures and memories. She had painted the Georgian panelling in what less sophisticated souls might have accused of being an “off-white” — I well remember making this mistake myself! — but which was, apparently, the faintest and hence most elegant eau-de-nil imaginable. Into this room she had allowed only a few of the very best pieces of furniture — two gilt-gesso chairs, and a matching chaise longue, upon which — so far as I know, at least — no one ever dare recline, all covered in what she would have called a “light hearted” contemporary fabric, just to show she wasn’t taking any of this grandeur at all seriously.

A small selection of  vague but surprising expensive drawings by some foreign woman with a thing about spiders dotted the walls. The bed was a strange confection, designed by Jenny herself, involving a sort of baldichino dressed in almost unbelievable amounts of oddly lumpy fabric that looked like sacking but was in fact hand-woven silk, ordered in at great expense from Italy, and put together by a team that came up from Chelsea for a week just to do it. 

It was here, in this carefully-curated room, that Jenny had spent her last months on earth — thinner and more angry by the day, unreconciled to a life that had not, in final analysis, worked out the way she had expected it would, yet also resistant to death. She was attended, ever more reluctantly, by our neighbour Joe, whom you’ll remember from our own school days. In the end he, too, let her down — in his case by living on, however briefly, after she was no longer able to do so. 

It was in this very bed, as far as that goes, that Jenny, shrunken and faded, had died, while I sat next to her, not quite daring to take her hand. 

And — strange to say — it was there that I finally located little Kitty.

She was lying on the bed, on top of the damask bedspread, small, almost doll-like, turned slightly on her side. Perhaps she had been having a nap. The room, it must be said, was by now almost dark. Whatever the case, though, she made no attempt to hide from me. Instead, like some sort of wild animal — a hare, perhaps — she simply lay there — very, very still, her lovely dark eyes trained almost fiercely on me, willing me not to notice her, even though she was in no sense concealed — even though she must have known she had been seen. 

A great many things happened over those days which I cannot, even now, properly explain. But for some reason — impossible now to reconstruct — I simply looked around the room again, shook my head, stepped back out into the corridor, and closed the door, gently, behind me — not, though, before once again catching a glimpse, which I am sure was not merely my imagination, of something moving, quickly, urgently, as if running late for something, alongside the brook in the garden below. 

When I reached the kitchen — HQ, home base — Ren was seated at the table, playing a game on his phone. This, by the way, is how I had realised he was in the kitchen. I had heard that jingling tune emerging up the back stairs, and accordingly made my way down in search of it. Ren was halfway through a packet of biscuits to which he had helped himself from the pantry. He looked very sleepy. 

“Ren! Where were you, darling? I looked everywhere. Well done, though, young man — you win!”

Ren smiled, lazily, but then set me right. “Kitty win. She first.”

“But where’s Kitty?”

“Here, silly!” 

Sure enough, just as Ren said these words, little Kitty came padding out of the pantry, which can only be reached by way of the kitchen, carrying a packet of sweets — then looking, in quick succession, rather guilty, then entirely innocent, then prim, then very engagingly amused. 

“Gampa slow!” she crowed at me, joyously. “Where Gampa? Too slow! I win!” And with this, she proceeded to open the packet of sweets, laurels awarded to the victrix, her rightful reward. 

I sat down at the table and covered my face with my hands, as the kitchen rang with the weirdly poignant, haunting melody of Ren’s never-ending game, and the laugher of two tired yet vastly amused little twins. 

+++

After the twins had been retired, I had a WhatsApp message from Jeremy. His sparkling wine drama had, apparently, been resolved. He’d be back in Norfolk by lunchtime the next day. He promised, obscurely, that he would bring with him “a nice surprise”. 

I assumed, without considering that matter very deeply, that this meant a compensatory bottle of off-brand fizz. More to the point, it would be good to have Jeremy back, not only for the twins’ sake but also, I had to admit, increasingly for my own. 

I had, however, other things on my mind. First, there was Carter-Fitzgerald’s scarecrow, which I was sure we had all actually encountered — why else would the twins be so obsessed with it? Yet evidence was mounting that it had never existed. Secondly, I was unnerved by what I had seen — or perhaps not seen at all — earlier that evening in Jenny’s room. 

There seemed little chance of sleeping. I considered a medicinal brandy or four, but then thought better of it. I picked up the new volume of Norfolk Archaeology — a particularly spicy one, as it happens — but then I put it down again. My contempt for my own indecision, my own lack of nerve was increasingly to an almost unbearable pitch. 

My beloved house felt hot, musty, airless — stifling. Perhaps my wanderings earlier in the evening had stirred up the dust? Passing the French doors that led out onto the terrace, I opened them, and stepped into what was still an unfinished dusk — cool, sweetly sad somehow, the air freighted with the first hint of fallen leaves. 

The wind was still blowing, but the clouds had thinned again, so that between the scudding clouds I could glimpse a few of the earlier stars. Wandering along the terrace, I inadvertently crushed some thyme underfoot, releasing its purifying scent. The house behind me was mostly dark, except for a room or two along the ground floor. There was something oppressive, suddenly, about its proximity. Going round the corner, I crossed from the terrace onto the drive, where the gravel crunched briskly beneath my feet. 

Should I have walked away from the house? Of course not. In the time that has passed between then and now, I’ve had ample opportunity to consider that point. The twins, I knew, were upstairs. It was irresponsible, at the very least, to have deserted my post — to have left them alone in the house, even for a moment. Yet somehow, prey to some devilish whim, that’s exactly what I did. I walked away from the house, up the drive, and off towards the main gates. 

Perhaps I should add a few points here, by way of inadequate excuse or propitiation. 

As you know, we live in the countryside, in a village miles from anywhere. We invariably leave our doors unlocked, our windows open, our approaches unpoliced with CCTV. More to the point, Pagets is set with acres of its own land, quite a distance from any street, let alone any other dwelling. Also, I cannot have meant to go very far. I needed to clear my head. I hoped that fresh air would achieve that. So it was that almost before I knew it, I had crossed the little stone bridge that spans the brook, walked the length of the drive between its flanking sentinels of century-old beech trees, passed through the gates and out onto the road that leads to the village. 

Where did I mean to go? I wasn’t in search of the scarecrow. I didn’t turn down towards Low Lane. Nor did I do the other obvious thing, which would have meant taking the road that led up to St Michael’s — always locked at night these days, more’s the pity — and to the churchyard surrounding it. There, countless generations of my ancestors lie buried — as, indeed, does poor dear Jenny, under the headstone she chose for herself. She didn’t trust anyone else to do it. 

No, almost unconsciously, I found myself walking, purposefully, towards the shortcut that led to the gardens of Stone House — not through the main gates of the old friary, but through the little door in the precinct wall that led round the back. 

I knew that the owner was away, on one of her frequently, lengthy, never-explained absences. I had no hope of seeing her, of asking her to make sense of this mess for me. All I wanted to do, right then, was to sit for a few minutes in that garden, breathing the smell of stock and nicotiana and old roses, perched on a bit of robbed-out foundation, looking at the stars, reminding myself that such peace was possible. 

Yet tonight, for the first time ever, the wooden door in the wall stood firmly locked. No matter how I tugged at the handle or thumped at it with my fists or flung the bulk of my body against it, it wouldn’t budge. In the end, there was nothing to do but to turn around and walk back home. 

Back within my own gates, it seemed as if nothing at all had changed. The moon had risen. Except when the rolling clouds obscured it, there was just enough light to allow me to see into the beech wood, to glimpse the end of the drive — to give me a view of the whole long front of the house, by time time I’d made it up the drive and was standing there before it, gazing at it in the moonlight. There was no one about. 

Going back round the corner, I stepped onto the terrace, and re-entered the house through the big French doors, closing them behind me. Inside, all was silence. Other than in the kitchen corridor, where the lights are always on, the darkness enveloped everything. By touch and by memory, as much as anything else, I found my way across into the kitchen, where I checked, as I always do, that everything was in order. 

The walk to Stone House had not, in the end, been the redemptive thing I had hoped it would be. It seemed to mark, though, a sort of transition. I decided it was time for bed. 

It was only on a whim — yes, another of these endless, accursed whims! — that I decided, on the way up the main stairs, to check on the twins. I could very well have just gone to my bedroom and called it a night. Yet for some reason, instead of opening my own bedroom door, I instead climbed the smaller flight of stairs that led up towards the second floor. 

Again, all was in order. The lights were out. The doors, I am sure, were all as I had left them. I might just have left it at that, and gone to bed. 

Instead, though — being a quiet as I could — I opened the door of the night nursery and peeked inside. 

Because Ren insisted on sleeping with the lights on, I didn’t even need to reach for the light switch in order to grasp, in a sickening moment of certainty, that the twins were no longer there. 

+++

It’s funny, isn’t it, how one’s mind works at a moment like that? My first thought was that Jenny would be furious at me — despite that fact that Jenny is, indeed, dead. Only after that did I realise that I simply couldn’t, no matter what, under any circumstances, tell Jeremy what had happened. I’m not proud of either of these things. The latter, though, at least has the merits of explaining why I didn’t, as I obviously ought to have done, get round to ringing the police. 

Meanwhile half of my brain was counselling me, soothingly, that the twins had, of course, simply decided to continue their game of hide-and-seek — a recreation at which, we had already proved to everyone’s satisfaction, they absolutely excelled. They were almost certainly there in the house. Perhaps they were simply hiding under their beds, or in the wardrobe! No need to be alarmed, no need to over-react. 

Concurrently, the other half of my brain was frozen in a state of absolute, fathomless, gut-wrenching horror. Had the Scarecrow stolen them? Had Jenny stolen them? Nothing made sense. Everything made sense. 

It was all unbearable. 

I am, though, as we established earlier, a methodical person. I have a methodical way of doing things. I’ve been trained that way. I’m good in a crisis. I wasn’t going mad, either. I would find those twins, and bring them back to where they ought to be. All would be well.

So it was that I started searching, very sensibly, very methodically. 

Calling cheerfully to the twins — “Darlings! Do come out, now — you’re better at this than Gampa is, I admit it!” — I proceeded to search the entire house, very much as I’d searched it earlier that evening. 

I even, for the second time that day — and this must have been only the second time I’d done this literally for years — opened the door of Jenny’s room, held my breath and ventured inside. Yet not a living soul was in that room — I was sure of that. There was only a vague glow of moonlight, illuminating the bed and indeed the oddly wrinkled bedspread that lay across it. 

In the end, I had to conclude that the twins simply weren’t in the house. 

Two clues did, in time, emerge. 

The first was that the twins’ phones had vanished, too. I found this encouraging, if only because it implied they had left of their own volition. Either that, or whoever had stolen them had taken away their phones, too. So perhaps the clue wasn’t so encouraging after all. 

Secondly, just outside the door that led from the service wing out towards the walled garden I found, lying on the path, Kitty’s bubblegum-pink sandal, the buckle finally broken. 

My next plan was to search the grounds. As you know, our land here at Pagets — what my father, bless him, didn’t manage to sell off to Carter-Fitzgerald’s father — stretches to something like two dozen acres. If you exclude the arable and the big meadows, though, it’s more like seven or eight acres, much of that laid to woodland. 

Babes in the Wood indeed! Suppressing this thought, I made my way methodically around the margins of the lawn, around the walled garden where the hens were tucked away safely in their closed runs and sturdy nest boxes, down along the length of the brook, through the obvious paths that run across the beech wood, right up to the big iron gates. 

The moon was, by that point, riding high in the sky. The clouds had thinned out. The wind had dropped considerably. I felt certain that if the twins had been out in the grounds, by this point I would have found them. I hadn’t, though. The time, then, had come to consider other, more desperate options. 

It’s funny how starkly, how pitilessly the world of familiar things transforms itself at a moment like that. All terrain becomes hostile.

The river that runs through our village, and in particular the weir — as beloved of the current Instagram generation as it was of 19^th century Norwich School painters in oils — shifts from a picturesque landscape feature into a locus of ineluctable tragedy. The redundant gravel quarry, for so long the subject of banal and boring planning disputes, becomes a sort of monstrous maw, lying in wait to consume then regurgitate the weary or unwary. Unfamiliar cars, incidental callers, even the paths and lanes and shady byways themselves become freighted with threat.

The effect of this was to make our tiny village — hardly more than a rambling high street, encircled with a nimbus of newer housing and dotted with a few older buildings, public and private — feel infinite, so various and terrible were its dangers. 

Even worse, though, perhaps, were the frankly insane things that seemed as real, in that moment, as those other, more rationally-framed dangers. Under normal circumstances I can, for instance, remember very little from the German lessons of our school days. Standing at the end of the drive, however, it seemed as if every single line of Goethe’s Erlkönig was there in my head, but somehow with a scarecrow playing the lead role, stretching ever forward with those terrible, pink, distended fingers — gaping with his horrible, blind, senseless, featureless face. 

No, while there are plenty of things that have frightened me in this life — as you well know — there was never, not once, anything that even compared with this. 

Still, there was nothing to do but carry on. Leaving the shelter of the great gates, I started out down the road, headed back towards the village. There was no one about — no cars, no people — nothing. 

When I called, tentatively — quietly — to the twins, the sound of my voice echoed back to me from the empty space around me — unsteady, desperate — almost unrecognisable. 

I paused, for a moment, to steady myself. All I could hear, other than the echo of my voice, was the thundering of my own, unsteady pulse in my ears — and, in the distance, the indistinct, intermittent, callous, unbearable roar of the one major road that runs through our parish. I couldn’t bear to think of that road, or the cars that came surging along, blindly, brutally, at 60 mph or more. 

For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

And then, through the dark, came another sound — very faint, at first, but in a moment entirely recognisable. It was the jangling tune of Ren’s game. Blindly, trembling so badly I could hardly move, I staggered towards it.

Out of the dark, along the edge of the flint wall, from under the shadow of one of the beeches that lined that part of the road, came Ren and Kitty.

 They were both dressed just as they had been when I’d put them to bed — in their bedtime shorts and t-shirts — although also wearing, in Ren’s case, slip-on shoes, and in Kitty’s case, a single sandal. 

There in the darkened lane, the twins looked tiny, fragile, mysterious, almost uncanny. Yet I was also struck, oddly, by their bravery. They seemed composed, purposeful — very matter-of-fact, given that we were all standing out in the road on a cold windy evening at what must have been, at that point, quite literally the middle of the night. 

Through a final, supreme act of will, I stifled an impulse to dash towards them, enfold them in my arms and never let go of either of them ever again. 

Instead, I tried to steady the gulping erratic chaos that was my breathing. “Why, Ren and little Kitty, I presume! I had wondered where you two had got to — I was a bit worried, actually!”

“It’s okay” replied Ren, laconically. 

“Gampa funny,” opined Kitty. I think she must have been referring to my voice, or perhaps the look on my face. I redoubled my efforts to appear even approximately normal. 

“Next time, darlings, please let’s not go on a wander without telling someone first, copy? Next time, will you tell me?”

The twins looked at me blankly. And then, because at this point there was really nothing to lose, and because I really, really, had to know the answer, I tried another tack. 

“Why did you go walkabout, darlings? Was there a reason? Were you — were you looking for the Scarecrow?”

This, for some reason, seemed to strike the twins as hilarious. 

“No, silly! We look for Dad. We go find Dad.”

“But your, um, Dad’s in London, my darling. He’s where you were, before you came up here. You know that’s far away, don’t you?” Although still gasping for breath, I was trying so hard to sound calm and reasonable — as much for my own sake as for anyone else’s. “You remember, don’t you? It took hours to drive from London to here. Imagine how long it would take to walk there!”

“Yes, it would take a long time” said Ren, reflectively. “Maybe even hours. Maybe. But we miss Dad. Also maybe Dad lost? Maybe not okay?”

“And then you got lost yourself?”

“A little,” conceded Ren. He was holding Kitty’s hand. Kitty yawned and leaned down to rub her bare foot. “We on big street, then no map .”

“Map?”

“On phone. No map.”

 Then, at last, I understood. The twins had located London on some mapping app, found the road that led to London, thought they could reach London in that way — but then, like so many before them, presumably lost their mobile signal. 

I am being glib about this, now. In truth, though, the reference to “big street” chilled me to the bone. 

This could only mean one thing — the twins had indeed got as far as the A-road to Swaffham. In fairness, this was, indeed, the way down to London — it was the way they had come up two days before. But it is also famously winding, badly lit, and dangerous — frequently the scene of accidents, or far worse. 

Anyway, Ren must have noticed, even there in the dark, the look on my face, because he was quick to reassure me. “It’s okay! Scary Crow Man make us go back.”

“The Scarecrow?”

“Yes, Starry Cow Man. He found us. He say Dad come tomorrow, after breakfast. He say stay! Gampa come and find us. Soon.”

“Yes, Story Cloud Man take hand like this, like Mom” — and here, Kitty mimed, with the help of Ren, pretending to walk hand-in-hand — “then we stay. Then he say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!” And here Kitty, sleepy but once again very merry, began waving, as if in fond farewell.

It was dark in the lane. I put my hands in the pockets of my jacket, largely to stop them from shaking.  I struggled to frame my words. 

“Scarecrow — Ren, Kitty, where is he now?”

Kitty laughed at me, but this time there was something in her sharp, barking laugh that had a warmth in it, a sort of affection, quite unlike Jenny’s version. “Silly, he gone away — I said! Did you listen, Gampa? He say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Goodbye, Scary Cow Man! The end!”

“It’s okay, Gampa.” 

Once again, Ren reminded me intensely of Jeremy — but what his tone recalled, specifically, was the way in which Jeremy had spoken to me when, after Jenny’s death, things had fallen apart a bit. Or was it someone else he conjured up then — did Ren remind me, in that moment, of my own father, after my mother had died? Both, perhaps. Or perhaps I was no longer able, in that moment, to distinguish between the two.

Ren, regarding me politely, must have decided that my stunned reverie had continued for quite long enough.  

“Gampa, can we go home now? Very  much night now. I can’t have very much night. Mom says.” 

+++

“Look what I brought you!” exclaimed Jeremy, extracting his long limbs from the tiny car, before reaching down to embrace the excited, shouting, deliriously happy twins, who had suddenly erupted, apparently out of nowhere, to greet him. 

I peered through the darkened glass of the windscreen, but could see nothing, until the door on the opposite side open and Hugo, my other son, emerged out into the sunshine, brushing his hair from his handsome face, looking around, breathing the air, like a swimmer stepping out of the water. 

Not for the first time, I wondered at how, in his ripped jeans and extremely demotic t-shirt, Hugo invariably managed to look smarter, more elegant and more purposeful than poor Jeremy, with his cords and tattersall shirt and air of goodhearted simplicity, could ever hope to do. 

“Papa!” Hugo enfolded me in a convincing hug. “It’s good to see you. Really.”

“Was everything okay?” enquired Jeremy, solemnly, a giggling child hanging off each arm. “With these appalling monsters, I mean?”

“Absolutely fine,” I lied. Then, not entirely lying, “They’re a joy, actually. Genuinely so. I love having them here.”

Hugo and Jeremy exchanged a look, as twins will — but then Jeremy began to spin himself around, first very slowly, then less slowly, in an attempt to detach his two offspring, who only clung on more tightly. The result of this was, all too soon, an unsightly heap of humanity upon the nearby lawn, onto which Hugo hurled himself, with a theatrical flourish.

And I stood, a little apart, and watched them all, these autonomous human beings who were, in some sense, made up of me and Jenny, of my parents and her parents — live beings composed out of dead ones, old wine in new bottles — and felt at once one with them and strangely distant from them, as if I were looking back at at them from a very great distance, only indistinctly real, a shadow of the past thrown briefly across a happy, untroubled present. 

At that point, though, Hugh helpfully rose, explained to us all that he was going to run to the walled garden because he knew that he could run there much faster than Jeremy could, let alone these tiny little baby twins who probably couldn’t even run at all, let alone his decrepit old much-loved Papa — whereupon of course we all had no choice but to follow, joyous if in some cases creaking and breathless, in his glamorous wake. 

+++

Lunch was done. We sat at the old Colebrookdale table on the lawn. The sun was bright once again, casting long shadows on the sun-bleached grass, throwing the south front of the house into strong relief, clearly autumnal, yet still somehow strong enough to burn our faces. 

As you know, the twins — my twins — both inherited the ancestral curse of my own Anglo-Irish pallor, as opposed to Jenny’s sleek, enigmatic half-hint of something more olive, even Mediterranean — but inherited also an innate fatalism which, somehow, discourages what others would probably regard as the sensible use of suncream. 

Chipped paint from the table littered the ground beneath, as indeed it had done for decades. 

“Scarecrow?” asked Jeremy, in reply to my eventual, stealthy, elaborately casual question. “No, sorry, Papa. Was there a scarecrow in that field? I don’t remember it.”

“Really? Not up at Carter-Fitzgerald’s place, just below Harrow Hill?”

“Sorry, Papa, but I’m afraid I don’t remember any scarecrow at all. On the other hand, it had been a long day, after a very long flight — and we were with the twins, you know, so I was probably not at my sharpest. I remember Kitty scraped her foot, and kicked up an almighty fuss about it, as per usual, but that’s about it.”

“And you don’t even remember the twins talking about a scarecrow?”

Jeremy’s face contracted into that distinctive, lopsided, quizzical expression, as he tried to decide what to say. But when he replied, it was only with a mute, apologetic shake of his head. 

For what it was worth, I believed him. I don’t think he remembered a thing about the scarecrow.

Hugo, for his part, was reclining elegantly in his metal garden chair, tilting it back just to that delicate tipping-point before everything spills over into disaster. Out of habit, I stifled the urge to tell him to sit properly — and then realised, with a strange twinge of pleasure that, actually, he was now an adult, so he could do what he liked. 

It was odd to see Hugo again. For reasons I had never properly examined, despite being Jeremy’s twin, Hugo had somehow always been more Jenny’s child than mine — more attuned to her moods, more in sync with her, less subject to her criticism. It wasn’t that we’d fallen out, exactly. We’re not that sort of family. Since Jenny’s death, though, I had seen a great deal less of him than I had previously. 

Hugo’s acting career, Jenny’s pessimism notwithstanding, showed occasional signs of success. Indeed, shaming though it is, I can perhaps admit this to you. Once or twice, on evenings when I felt the old Black Dog nipping at my heels, I used to seek out his performances — bit parts, executed with charm and flair — where these could be gleaned via YouTube. I’d watch them over and over again. Hugo was, as far as I could see, invariably cast as a pompous, ineffectual, emotionally-underdeveloped army officer. And in this role, for whatever reason, he was highly convincing.

Hugo must have noticed that I was looking at him, because he suddenly snapped his chair property upright, blazed the most luxuriously refulgent of smiles in my direction, then fixed his gaze on the middle distance. 

“Are those trees different?” Hugo was looking at the gap between our lawn and Carter-Fitzgerald’s field. “They look different.”

“We haven’t lost any trees, but I agree — they do look different. It’s a bit of mystery, to be honest.”

“I quite like it, actually,” pronounced Hugo. “It gives more of a vista. Lets a bit of light in. Creates a depth of field. That sort of thing.” 

“Pretentious freak,” said Jeremy affectionately, throwing an apple core at Hugo, which Hugo dodged with great efficiency. 

“Barbarian,” replied Hugo, looking for something to throw, but finding nothing. 

For a minute or two the three of us contemplated the horizon, lost in our own thoughts, enjoying the late sunshine.

“It’s good to be back, actually,” said Hugo, in reply to nothing at all. “I’d missed this place.”

“I know what you mean,” agreed Jeremy, twinnishly. “It’s okay, isn’t it? Not bad at all. Definitely okay.”

Meanwhile the little twins — also, I suppose, in some sense my twins — had received with evident pleasure our collective offerings of sparkling elderflower, homemade shortbread from Mrs Goody, plus a tray of sushi acquired by their father and uncle at the motorway services just south of Stanstead. They had then agreeably exhausted themselves in some sort of game devised by Jeremy and Hugo, which once again deteriorated — or perhaps advanced — into a massive, loud, apparently satisfying wrestling-match on the lawn. 

The phones, abandoned on the table in order to play this game, had somehow remained there, momentarily forgotten.

Kitty and Ren were instead engaged, seemingly quite happily, in the age-old pursuit, which indeed you might remember from our own school days, all those decades ago. With the most minimal help from Jeremy and Hugo, they were trying  to dam up the brook using stones, including the stones the edge the borders, and the ones from the edge of the drive, and even the ones from that High Victorian rockery of my grandma’s that Jenny always hated so much, but never quite got round to demolishing — remember that? 

These days, however, no one even thinks to tell children off for borrowing the stones! Indeed some of those stones are still down in the brook, even now, where the water now runs quite happily around them, making new eddies and currents, new pools and channels, for all the world as if it had been doing so forever.

The End

Author’s note: for anyone who might be wondering about this, the story above does indeed follow on, however indirectly, from another story of mine, titled Flesh on the Bone. That story appears in my 2024 collection, The Lammas Ghosts: Fifteen Norfolk Ghost Stories. It is available (including as an e-book) here, on Amazon, or you can ask your favourite independent bookseller to order it for you.