The Broken Window

Ruth came home on Saturday morning and knew at once that something was wrong. The kitchen window was broken. Glass lay on the floor inside the room, near the table, and the cold air came straight in. Her cat was nowhere in the flat.

She stood still for a minute and made herself think. Someone must have come in. She looked at the desk, at the box where she kept her money, at the gold ring her mother had given her. Nothing was gone. So it can't have been a thief. A thief does not break a window, climb in, and then leave the money sitting on the desk.

Mr Ward from the next flat heard her walking about and came to the door. He is old, he moves slowly, and he misses nothing.

"Look at where the glass is," he said. "It is all inside. If the glass is inside, the window was hit from the garden."

They went down. The ground was still cold from the rain in the night, and under the window, in the middle of the flowers, there was a ball.

"There," said Mr Ward. "Your window did not break on its own."

"It might have been the storm," Ruth said. "The wind was strong in the night."

"The wind does not leave a ball in your garden."

By the gate stood a bike, a cheap green one, too small for a man. Ruth knew it. "That is the boy from number nine," she said. "He can't be more than ten."

On the wall by the gate there was the trace of a shoe, and above it a mark where something had pulled at the stone. Somebody had climbed over.

"He must have gone in after the ball," said Mr Ward.

"Then where is my cat?" said Ruth.

They looked under every chair in the flat. Nothing. "She may be hiding," said Mr Ward. "Cats hide when they are afraid. Or she could have gone out through the window."

It was Ruth who found the note. It had blown off the table and lay half under it, in a corner where she would never have looked. The writing was a boy's writing, slow and careful.

"I am sorry about your window. I have your cat. She was afraid and she came to me. She is safe at ours. The ball is ours too. Sam."

Mr Ward laughed. "He should have knocked."

"He must have been afraid," said Ruth. "I would have been, at his age."

Before lunch there was a knock at the door. Sam stood there in a big coat with the cat against his shoulder. He did not look up.

"I climbed over to get her," he said. "I know I should have come and told you first. You can tell my dad."

Ruth took the cat. She was warm and soft and cross about everything.

"You could have hurt yourself," Ruth said. "Look at your knee."

There was a red line under the boy's knee where the glass had caught him. He said it was nothing. She made him sit at the kitchen table while she cleaned it, and he told her the whole story: the game in the garden, the ball going high and wrong, the noise of the glass, the cat running out at him, the long walk home holding her.

"I will pay for the window," he said. "I have my holiday money."

"Some of it," said Ruth. "Not all of it. And next time you knock."

They did not argue about it. The whole thing was solved before the middle of the day, and the window was cheap to fix in the end. What Ruth remembers is the boy at her kitchen table, the cat asleep on his coat, and the quiet joy of a morning that could easily have gone another way.