Midnight is a Lonely Place (6 page)

She should have felt pleased with herself. She was in the country at last. She was ready to begin work. She had the peace and quiet she desired – Greg’s attitude had not left her in any doubt that her privacy would be respected – and yet there was a nagging sadness, a feeling of anticlimax which had not a little to do with Jon, curse him. Only three weeks before, she had been living with him, researching the book, settled, a Londoner at least for the foreseeable future, and now here she was in a small cottage on the wild north-eastern coast of Essex with strangers for neighbours, no money, no man, no fixed abode and only Lord Byron for company.

Glancing at the floor where her boxes of books lay in a pool of lamplight she stood up again restlessly. She went over and, groping for her glasses in the pocket of her jeans, she began wearily to tear the sticky tape from the top of one of them. She must stay positive. Forget Jon. Forget London. Forget everything except the book.

The door banging upstairs made her jump. She glanced up at the ceiling and she could feel her heart thumping suddenly somewhere in the back of her throat. For a moment she did nothing, then slowly she straightened.

There was no one in the house so it must have been the wind, but at the foot of the stairs she paused, looking up into the darkness, the thought of Greg’s legionnaire suddenly in the forefront of her mind.

Taking a firm grip on herself she walked up onto the landing. Both doors stood open as she had left them. Switching on the light she peered into the bedroom where earlier she had put her cases side by side near the cupboard. She looked round the room, satisfied herself that nothing was amiss and turned off the light. She repeated the action across the landing, staring round the empty bedroom, her eyes gazing uncomfortably at the two windows which were curtainless. The glass reflected the cold light of the central naked bulb and she was very conscious once again of the blackness of the night outside.

Frowning, she went downstairs. There had been nothing that she could see to account for the noise. She peered into the bathroom and the kitchen and then turned back to the living room.

The room was distinctly chilly. Walking over to the woodburner she peered at it doubtfully and, seeing the reassuring glow from within had disappeared, she stooped and reached for the latch. The metal was hot. She swore under her breath and looked round for something to pad her hands. Finding nothing she tugged at her sleeve and, wrapping the wool of her jersey around her fingers, she jiggled the latch undone and swung the doors open. The stove contained nothing but a bed of embers.

She glanced round but she had already realised that her tour of the cottage had yielded no coal; no log basket. She had grown spoiled living in London; the subject of heating had never crossed her mind. Central heating arrived for her these days at the flick of a switch. The hot water and heating in this cottage, it dawned on her suddenly, probably all depended on this small stove. Why hadn’t Greg mentioned it? Surely the first thing he should have told her was how to heat the place. She shook her head in irritation. The omission was probably deliberate. She would have had to be very dense not to have sensed his hostility and resentment. Teach the townie a lesson. Well, if the townie wasn’t going to freeze to death she would have to find some fuel from somewhere. A swift search produced one box of matches in the kitchen drawer, – thank heaven for that. As a non smoker it had never crossed her mind to bring matches. But there were no fire lighters, and there was no torch. There was nothing for it. Cursing herself for her own stupidity she realised she was going to have to explore outside in the dark.

Firmly putting all thoughts of the unexplained noise out of her head, she pulled on her jacket and gloves and with some reluctance she walked into the hall, unbolted the front door and pulled it open, fastening the latch back as she peered out into the darkness.

The wind caught her hair and pulled it back from her face, searing her cheeks. It was fresh and sharp with the scent of the sea and the pine woods which crowded across the grass towards her. She stood still for a moment, very conscious that she was silhouetted in the doorway. Reminding herself that there was no one watching she stared out at the path of light which ran from her feet in a great splash along the track before it dissipated between the trees. On either side of it the darkness was intense. She could see nothing beyond the muddy track with its windblown grasses and tangle of dead weeds.

Reluctantly, she stepped away from the door and began to walk along the front of the cottage, one hand extended cautiously in front of her touching the rough plastered walls. As her eyes grew used to the dark she could see the stars appearing one by one above her, and patches of cloud, pale against the blackness, and she became aware slowly of the sea shushing gently against the shingle in the distance and the wind sighing in the trees. She was straining her eyes as she reached the corner and peered round. Half way along the wall there was a small lean-to shed which must surely be some kind of fuel store. Moving a little faster as her confidence increased, she felt her feet grow wet in the grass.

Her fingers encountered the boards of the lean-to at last – overlapping, rough, splintery through her gloves. She groped her way around it until she came to the open doorway where she stopped, hesitating. The entrance gaped before her, the darkness intensely black and impenetrable after the luminous dark of the night, but she could smell the logs. Thick, resinous and warm, the scent swam up to her. Stooping, she groped through the doorway. Her hands met nothing but space. She reached out further and suddenly her fingers closed around something ice cold. A handle. Whatever it was slipped from her grasp and fell to the ground with a clatter. She stooped and picked it up. A spade. It was a spade. Leaning it against the wall, she took a cautious step forward, bending lower, and found herself right inside the shed. There at last her groping fingers encountered the tiers of stacked logs, their ends sharp, angled, their sides rough and rounded. Cautiously she pulled at one. The whole pile stirred and she leaped back. ‘From the top, you idiot.’ She found she had actually spoken out loud and the sound of her voice was somehow comforting. Straightening a little, she raised her hands, groping for the top of the pile and one by one she reached down four logs. That was all she could carry. Clutching them against her chest she stumbled out of the shed backwards and retraced her steps towards the corner of the wall. Once there the stream of cheerful light from the hall guided her back to the front door. She almost ran inside and throwing the logs down on the floor she turned and slammed the door shut, shooting the bolt home.

It was only as she looked down at the logs, covered in sawdust and cobwebs that she realised how frightened she had been. ‘You idiot,’ she said again. Shaking her head ruefully she began to pull off her anorak. What had she been afraid of? The silence? The wood? The dark?

She had been afraid of the dark as a child in her own little bedroom next to Anne’s in their Herefordshire farmhouse. Night after night she would lie awake, not daring to move, hardly daring to breathe, her eyes darting here and there around the room, looking – looking for what? There was never anything there. Never anything frightening, just that awful, overwhelming loneliness, the fear that everyone else had left the house and abandoned her. Or died. Had her mother guessed in the end, or had she confessed? She couldn’t remember now, but she did remember that her mother had given her a night light. It was a china owl, a white porcelain bird with great orange claws and huge enigmatic eyes. ‘You’ll scare the child to death with that thing,’ her father, a country doctor with no time for cosseting his own family, had scoffed when her mother produced it from the attic, but Kate had loved it. When the small night-light candle was lit inside it the whole bird glowed with creamy whiteness and its eyes came alive. It was a kind bird; a wise bird; and it watched over her and kept her company and kept the spooks at bay. When she was older the owl had remained unlit, an ornament now, but her fear, tightly rationalised and controlled, had remained. Sometimes, even when she was a student at university, she had lain in her room in the hall of residence, the sheet pulled up to her chin, her fingers clutched in the pillow she was hugging to her chest as she stared at the dark square of the window. The fear had gone now. Only one hint of it remained. She always opened the curtains at night. With them closed the darkness gave her claustrophobia. Jon had laughed at her, but he had conceded the open curtain. He liked it open because he loved to see the dawn creeping across the London roofs as the first blackbirds began to whistle from the television aerials across the city.

Well, that Kate was grown up now, and on her own and not afraid. Pulling herself together, she gathered up the logs and, walking through into the sitting room, she stacked them neatly in the fireplace beside the stove. Opening it again she peered in. The embers were very low. She looked at the logs thoughtfully. If she put one of those in it would just smother the small remaining sparks and put the whole thing out. She had no fire lighters. What she needed was newspaper and some dry, small twigs to rebuild the fire. She stared round.

In the kitchen the vegetable rack in the corner was lined with newspaper. She grabbed it, showering a residue of mud from long gone potatoes over the kitchen boards. There was enough to crumple into four good-sized wads. Stuffing them in around the log she lit it and closing the doors, slid open the damper. The sudden bright blaze was enormously satisfying but she held her breath. Would the paper burn and then leave the log to go out?

She glanced over her shoulder at the room and shivered. It had lost its appeal somehow. Her lap top computer and printer lying on the table rebuked her; the boxes of filing cards, the notebooks, the cardboard boxes full of books. She glanced at her watch. It was eight o’clock. She was hungry, she was tired and she was cold. A boiled egg, a cup of cocoa and a hot bath, if the wood-burner could be persuaded to work, and she would go to bed. Everything else could wait until morning. And daylight.

VII

It was bitterly cold and barely light. Well wrapped up in a Shetland sweater and thick jacket with two pairs of socks inside her boots and a pair of her younger brother’s gloves, Alison Lindsey stood staring at the cottage from the shelter of the trees. It was in darkness. Downstairs the curtains were drawn, but upstairs both the front windows which looked down across the garden appeared to be uncurtained. She frowned, then plucking up her courage she sprinted across the grass. Heading straight for the log shed she ducked inside and groped around in the darkness. After a second she gave an exclamation of annoyance. Her tools had been moved. She kicked crossly at the firewood and leaped back with a mixture of fright and malicious satisfaction as one of the piles began to slip. Dodging the cascading logs she watched until they had stopped moving, waiting for the noise to die away. The dust settled, but there was no sound from the cottage. ‘Lady Muck’s asleep,’ she whispered to herself and she gave a superior smile. She turned to the doorway again and then she saw her spade. It had been propped up in the corner.

Picking it up she peered out into the silent dawn. It was well before sunrise. The morning was damp and ice cold and there were still long dark shadows across the sea, stretching out into the black mist.

Running lightly she headed across the shingle and leaped down into the hollow on the seaward side of the dune. Her dune.

The tide in the night, she saw with satisfaction, had not been very high. The sea wrack on the shore, still wet with spume, was several feet short of her excavation and had come nowhere near the place where she was digging. Her tongue protruding slightly from between her teeth she set to, cutting the soft sand into sections and scooping it away from the side of the dune. From somewhere in the darkness along the shore she heard the scream of a gull.

Her hands were frozen after only a few moments in spite of the thick gloves and already her headache had come back. With an irritable sigh, she paused to rest, leaning on her spade as she blew on her wool-covered knuckles. The sand was crumbling where she had attacked it and as she watched, another section fell away by itself. With it it brought something large and curved and shiny. Throwing down the spade she bent over it and gently worked the object free of the sand. It was another section of pottery. Much larger this time. Large enough to hold the curve of the bowl or vase of which it had once formed a part. Through her gloves, as she dusted away the damp sand fragments, she could feel the engraved decoration. She stared at it for a long time, then carefully she put it to one side and attacked the sand with renewed vigour. Minutes later something else began to appear. It was thin and bent and a corroded green colour, like a rusty bit of old metal. Forgetting the pain in her temples she pulled at it in excitement. Thick as a man’s thumb it was several inches long, with a rough knob at one end. Turning it over in her hands she stared at it for a long time, then, scrambling out of the hollow of her sheltered digging place she ran over the shingle towards the sea. The shingle was wet and smelled of salt and weed, the night’s harvest of shells and dead crabs lying amongst the stones. Nearby she could see the gulls picking amongst them. Crouching down, her feet almost in the water, she swished the object back and forth in the edge of the tide and then she stared at it again. It was no cleaner. The greenness was a part of it. She took off her glove and ran a cautious finger over it, feeling a certain symmetrical roughness on the cold metal as though at some point in the distant past it had been carved, though now the incrustations of time and sea and sand had covered it forever.