The Young Accomplice

Benjamin Wood

THE YOUNG ACCOMPLICE

About the Author

Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and won Le Prix du Roman Fnac. He was a finalist for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and his other works have been shortlisted for the Encore Award, the CWA Gold Dagger Award and the European Union Prize for Literature. He is a senior lecturer in creative writing at King’s College London, and lives in Surrey with his wife and sons.

By the same author

A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better

The Ecliptic

The Bellwether Revivals

For Isaac and Oren

‘We do not learn much by our successes: we learn more by failures – our own and others’, especially if we see the failures properly corrected. To see a failure changed to a success – there is what I call Education.’

Frank Lloyd Wright

Part One

THE MAYHOODS

June 1952

The old man had been treading couch grass in the field since dawn, halting now and then to hack a nettle stalk with his dull scythe. Sometimes, he’d inspect the heads of flowering weeds and peer back, agonized, towards the house, as though he’d sighted a pernicious species long presumed extinct. Arthur Mayhood watched him from the steps of his back porch. It was the sort of clear, bright morning that made him recognize how close he was to happiness – a wholesome sunlight over Ockham that seemed as thick as tallow, and the verdancy of every acre in his view like something rendered for a postcard. If he looked far enough into the distance, he could forget the dire state of his farm and feel good about himself again, remember what it was that brought him out here in the first place. There was so much to do at Leventree that he’d not anticipated. It had been less than a year, all told, and the house was in good order, but trying to restore the land had broken him, one fruitless day after another. A stubborn part of him used to believe he was invulnerable to the drudge of manual labour: for as long as he still had the use of one good arm, he could manage twice the work of anyone. Well, that streak in him was gone now, too. Lately, he’d resolved to take whatever crumb of help or wisdom anyone could throw at him. The old man was a case in point.

His name was Hollis and he’d shown up in the yard at six a.m., as promised, wearing a large straw sunhat on a string across his back. A glower had set upon his face as he’d considered the condition of the fields a moment, but his feelings had remained unspoken. In the dawn light, he’d seemed thinner than he had the day before, his complexion rough as grout. He’d said he wouldn’t mind a cup of tea himself before they made a start on things – ‘Seeing as you’ve got one on the go already’ – so they’d stepped into the kitchen, eyeing one another, for as long as it had taken to drink up. There’d been some discussion of the lovely weather they’d been having, but the topic had run dry.