Authors: Sam Baker
Above it hung a portrait of a boy of about seven with blond ringlets and velvet knickerbockers, standing on a windswept moor with a long, low outcrop of rock behind him. The boy was smiling, a beam so full that Helen almost looked over her shoulder to see who he was looking at.
Visiting the servants’ floor above just long enough to confirm it was empty, Helen locked the door that led to it and every other bedroom door that had a bolt or a key. The more of the house she could shut down, the less daunted she’d feel.
At the end of the corridor, she stopped on the threshold of a smaller drawing room, its windows overlooking the forecourt. The room was tiny by comparison, its furniture relatively sparse, just a sagging armchair and rotting sofa made almost decent by a huge Indian throw. A threadbare Turkish rug hid most of the carpet. Over the fireplace was another painting of the same boy, a year or two older, in knee boots, his smile replaced by a scowl. In spite of the painting, the room felt, if not good, then calm. Wandering back out on to the landing, Helen decided not to lock it.
Satisfied the house was secure, she returned to the kitchen and set about unpacking her shopping. What had she been thinking, buying so much stuff? She’d gone intending to stock up on store-cupboard essentials: coffee, tea, milk, bread. A bottle of vodka. Now this. She’d even bought running kit from the sports shop next to the supermarket. That, at least, might be useful.
It was only as she lifted the last two bags from their soggy resting place on the hall floor that she noticed what was left of a note. It lay where her feet must have trampled it when she came in. The pale blue writing paper was good quality; the sort intended for proper letters; the kind that came with matching envelopes, and an unheeded lesson in the art of thank-you letters from a well-meaning relative. This sheet, though, had been folded in half, edges aligned. The words
Mademoiselle Graham
barely legible in unfamiliar handwriting. Biro, not ink. Just as well, given how soggy the paper was.
Eyeing the letter, Helen felt the knot in her stomach tighten again. Nobody in her world had handwriting that neat. Nobody she knew sent handwritten, hand-delivered notes instead of emails. Come to think of it, nobody called her Mademoiselle Graham. Nobody called her Mademoiselle anything. Clearing a space on the cluttered kitchen table, and smoothing the paper flat, Helen strained to make out blurred words scarcely a shade darker than the paper.
Dear Mademoiselle Graham,
I hope you are settling in well to our beautiful village. On the first Thursday of every month we have a ‘social’ at The Bull public house. As I gather from a friend at the letting agency that you will be with us for some time, we thought you might like to join us next Thursday and get to know your neighbours. We are a friendly bunch!
You will be welcome any time from 6.30 p.m. You’ll find The Bull on the right as you enter the village from the direction of Wildfell. You can’t miss it!
Looking forward to meeting you.
Yours,
Margaret Millward, Mrs
Balling the wet note, Helen hurled it at the sink.
You can’t miss it!?
She could and she would.
There’s always one, she thought, slamming tins and packets randomly on to shelves. Always. It’s the law. Wherever you are in the world, whatever you’re doing, every town/settlement/encampment has a self-appointed busybody who makes it their business to winkle you out. Although they call it ‘making you welcome’.
Worse, according to what remained of the address, this one ran the local shop, which meant she’d have to run the gauntlet whenever she needed a pint of milk.
Helen made a mental note to start drinking her tea black.
Back in the kitchen, she fished around inside the Sainsbury’s bags until she found what she needed and headed upstairs to the bathroom. No Formica here, just an enormous cast-iron bath supported on lion’s feet and brass taps that would have cost a fortune
in Paris unless you had a lucky break in a
brocante
. Above the loo there was a window that looked over the lichen-clad slate roof of an outhouse, probably the pantry or an as-yet-undiscovered utility room. She didn’t remember opening the window; but then she scarcely remembered anything of the past few days.
Peering at herself in a fly-specked mirror, Helen examined her face more closely. So ghostly pale as to be almost translucent, freckles fading, just the faintest hint of broken veins lining her nose; shadows, the baggage of endless nights of insomnia, circling already dark eyes. She was in there somewhere. Right now, it was hard to say where. Her long hair was a bedraggled mess; ends split and highlights growing back to their original reddish-brown. She’d never liked blonde, but Art did. And, well … she no longer had to please Art.
Helen flinched.
Tearing open the box of hair dye, she mixed the dye and developer in the tray provided, spread it evenly through her hair with a plastic comb, stumbling at each knot, then sat on the loo seat counting off fifteen minutes by her watch.
When her time was up, she unhooked the rubber shower attachment from the tap and shucked off her jumper, stopping briefly to look at the bruises braceleting her upper arm. They were fading now, yellowing at the edges, blurry orange in the middle. Wind blew in through the window and she shuddered.
With the dye rinsed off, she slid the nail scissors from their packet and began to cut; cautiously at first, then more confidently. Hardly expert, but it would do. By the time she’d finished nearly six inches were gone. Her wavy hair now stopped just below her shoulders. At a glance she looked almost like someone she recognised.
It was haunted, so they said. The big house. It was definitely haunted. Well, so those who believed in such things said, and even those who didn’t partake of old wives’ tales knew someone who knew someone who’d seen something where the lychgate met the Dales at dusk. Or maybe it was just a trick of the light and an ale or two too many. Everyone in the village had an opinion, and everyone agreed you had to be an outsider or stupid or have money to burn, probably all three, to rent an Elizabethan wreck no one with two legs had inhabited in years.
The gossip had started before the woman’s taxi pulled away that first night. Not that Gil saw the taxi or even knew there’d been one until he dropped into The Bull for his pint and a ploughman’s. He had better things to do with his time than stand in the window twitching his curtains. And besides, there were enough in this village to do that for him.
Truth be told, it got on his nerves. The constant minding everyone else’s business for them instead of looking to your own. It was getting on his nerves now … Well, Margaret Millward was as she served him in the General Stores.
The Times
for news,
Mirror
for the cricket (plus he had a soft spot for a good tab), the
Post
out of loyalty, the
Mail
, well, just because … He knew he could have got them all online hours earlier but he liked the sense of occasion, the heft and rustle of a paper with his morning coffee. A pint of semi-skimmed and a jar of instant balanced precariously on top of his pile of papers. He’d need twenty B&H from behind the counter. Logic said if he bought one pack at a time he could only smoke one pack at a time. Logic was flawed like that.
‘Arrived two days ago,’ Margaret Millward was saying as she rang up the cans of beans and frozen fish fingers of the woman two ahead of him. ‘Keighley radio cars … So she must have caught the train to there. Going to need a car if she’s planning on staying long. You can’t get far round here without your own transport, mess they’ve made of the buses.’
Revolted by the gossip as he was, Gil couldn’t help being impressed by Mrs Millward’s powers of deduction. Thirty years at the wordface of local journalism, and the village grapevine – of which Margaret Millward and her husband, Mike, who owned The Stores, were both root and branch – could still teach him a thing or two. Even with the steady flow of tourist traffic there was barely a face passing through she didn’t clock.
Missed her vocation, Gil thought idly. Or maybe she hadn’t.
‘Could be just another walker,’ the fish-finger buyer was saying as she rummaged for a scrawled-on ten-pound note. ‘Couldn’t move for them in The Bull last night. Even with the weather turning. Boots and rucksacks and those stupid poles.’
‘Why take the big house?’
‘A rich walker then. More money than sense, that’s for sure.’
Gil recognised the woman’s face but he couldn’t place her. He’d seen her in town though, over the years; had two girls slightly younger than his, he knew that much. Remembered her from some PTA cheese-and-wine thing Jan had bullied him into. Pretty sure they’d never spoken. Neighbours had been Jan’s remit.
‘Bet she’s gone in a week. Would have thought the rooms at The Bull would be a bit comfier than that old wreck.’
‘She’ll stay,’ Mrs Millward said confidently. ‘She paid up front in lieu of a deposit. You’re not going to walk away from that kind of money, are you? Gwen went in to give it a bit of a once-over on Monday. Said you could feel the damp right through to your bones. And the dust … well. Part of the furniture, it’s been there that long. Not to mention the atmosphere. Awful quiet, Gwen said, just the house going about its business, you know how they do, them old houses. Wouldn’t catch me up there on my tod in the middle of the night, thank you very much.’
She shuddered theatrically.
‘That’s just an old wives’ tale though, isn’t it?’ said the woman, looking less certain than she sounded. ‘Nothing about a bad atmosphere that a good airing can’t cure.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Margaret said. ‘There’s something about that place that can’t be shifted with a bit of an airing. There’s plenty that’s tried.’
The woman made a noise that could have been assent or disgruntlement, Gil wasn’t sure.
‘Had to make do with a bit of a vacuum, Gwen said. Well, it would be. Damp, I mean. Been empty for years. Decent-sized place though. Terrible waste, if you ask me.’
No one did, Gil noticed, but that didn’t stop her.
‘People today, they’re spoilt. A place hasn’t got as many bathrooms as bedrooms, they’re not interested. Someone should gut it, turn it into flats. That’d sort it.
‘Two pound thirty-four love,’ she said, without breaking off her monologue to serve the customer before Gil. There was no disputing this one was a walker. His two-pound-thirty-four’s worth of boiled sweets and bottled water should have been clue enough. If not, his hiking boots, cagoule in traffic-stopping orange, green rucksack and ‘stupid pole’ certainly were.
‘And how are you today, Mr Markham?’ Margaret put on her best voice, as if Gil hadn’t been listening to her regular one for the past five minutes.
‘Not bad, thanks. And it’s Gil,’ said Gil, as he had repeatedly since he moved back to the village where he’d been born. He dumped his shopping on the counter, the barricade from behind which – day in, day out – Margaret Millward held court.
‘Twenty B&H?’ she went on, as if he hadn’t spoken.
‘Please.’ He nodded.
‘Matches?’
He nodded again.
‘What a place to stay,’ Margaret Millward continued as she handed both over. ‘Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’
No, Gil wanted to say. It really doesn’t.
That was the problem with the village. One of many, in Gil’s opinion. More with every passing day. God only knew how Jan had put up with it all those years. But then, she hadn’t, had she? Or she’d still be here. Only now, two weeks into his retirement, was Gil finally beginning to understand why. Strange, if you thought about it, given how long he’d lived here. Although
living here
was a bit of an exaggeration, in light of the hours he worked and the weeks he spent in hotels covering conferences and strikes, train wrecks and natural disasters. Owned a place here then. Two cottages knocked into one, with the work overseen by Jan after they moved in … Gil caught an image of Jan, back in the day, pregnant with Karen, bloody great hole in the living-room wall, her and Lyn, six, maybe seven, knee-deep in brick dust, dust-smeared faces split by grins …
He pushed the thought down, hard.
More than half his life spent living in a place he hadn’t really lived in, leaving in the dark and arriving home in the dark. Hardly surprising that he hadn’t noticed what a bloody difficult place it was to go about your business without someone wanting to know what you were doing and why, and when you’d done doing it so they could ask questions about that. Some might find it endearing, comforting even. Gil didn’t. Not now. Not ever.
And Jan certainly hadn’t.
‘Go indoors, shut the curtains, turn the light off, sneeze, and next time you go in The Stores someone will ask how your cold’s doing.’ He’d thought she was exaggerating the first time she said that. She wasn’t. She was making a point. She’d been big on that. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been big on listening. He should have noticed when the moaning stopped. Should have known it was a sign and not a good one. But he hadn’t. And if he had, somewhere in the back of his mind when he got home gone eleven after a late shift, he decided to pay it no attention. He’d been glad of the peace. If he’d noticed, he might have realised she’d found someone who was listening. When she left, she took the kids. Well, Karen. Lyn had already gone. Best part of twelve years now. Gil could still remember Karen’s face, dark-eyed and hopeless, staring from the rear window as Jan pulled away, barely glancing in her wing mirror to check the road was clear.
Back home, Gil boiled a kettle, loaded two heaped spoons of Nescafé into his biggest mug, added a healthy slosh of semi-skimmed and a heaped teaspoon of sugar and set himself up at the kitchen table with that day’s papers. Years of night-editing meant he found fault with almost every one. Lazy, most of the headlines, predictable. He knew all about house style, but would it have killed them to make a bit more effort?