Authors: Sam Baker
Unusually large and unusually prompt, according to the gossip Gil eavesdropped on as he waited at the bar to be served. Catching Ray’s eye over a cluster of women, most of whom he hadn’t seen before – middle-aged, middle-weight, middle-height, middling smart; just middling, not, Gil feared, that he was one to talk – he signalled for his usual.
‘Busy tonight.’ He was starting to get the hang of small talk. Never been any good at it with the suits, and not that good at it now. But he was learning.
Typical
,
Jan would say, just when it’s not important any more you decide to bother. Gil shrugged inwardly. If it got him his pint ahead of the others …
‘Always packed on social night.’ Ray tipped the tankard and they both watched the opaque brown liquid slide down the inside of the heavy glass. ‘Didn’t expect to see you, mind. Not really your thing?’
It was framed as a question but Gil knew no answer was expected. They both knew why he was there. The same reason the others had turned out. Idle curiosity in most cases. Active, intense curiosity in the case of Margaret Millward. Tonight was special. A one-off. They were hoping for a guest of honour, the mysterious new woman up at the big house.
‘Mr Markham, what a pleasant surprise!’
Sweeping his change from the bar, Gil pasted a smile on his face and turned his attention to the woman at the centre of the cluster wedged between him and the bar.
‘Gil,’ he said. ‘Please, Mrs Millward, call me Gil.’
‘Gil,’ Margaret Millward repeated. In her mouth his name sounded like a bad taste. She forced a smile of her own. ‘I don’t think you know Liza, do you … Gil?’
Shaking his head, Gil put out his hand to a small slim woman standing beside his interrogator. He didn’t look at her properly, to be honest. More glanced in her general direction and smiled politely. He wouldn’t recognise her even if they had met before. She looked utterly familiar and a total stranger; and not just because she’d obviously had her highlights done at the same hairdresser as every other woman in the village. Consequently her hair was the same ashy blonde over barely concealed grey. What was it they said? Blonde is the new blue rinse? To be fair, now he did stop and take her in, she was better-looking than her friends. Not like Jan, of course. Roughly Jan’s age, though. Maybe two or three years younger. Quite smart too. Well turned out with a dark jacket over a fitted dress. Like she’d come straight from work.
‘How do you do?’ He tried not to stare over the top of her head; but a lifetime of being at least a foot taller than most women meant he couldn’t help looking like he was feigning interest, even when he wasn’t.
‘We’ve met, actually,’ Liza said, taking his hand and shaking it firmly enough to drag his attention down to her eye level. ‘More than once. You won’t remember.’
There was nothing to say. No point pretending otherwise.
‘New Year’s Eve, a few years ago, before …’
‘Ah,’ Gil nodded, saving her the trouble. ‘Before my divorce.’
‘No, actually, I was going to say before mine.’
‘Oh, I didn’t, uh …’ Gil took refuge in his pint.
‘Of course not. Why would you? Busy man, by all accounts.’
Gil raised his eyebrows. No need to ask by whose accounts. It was obvious. By the accounts of the woman standing next to her, smiling complacently. Margaret Millward was
this
far from patting her hair. One down, her expression said. And it suddenly dawned on Gil why she’d been so insistent he come. Nothing to do with the newcomer and everything to do with the divorcee standing directly in front of him. He was eligible-ish, slim-ish (instinctively Gil breathed in, hated himself for it), had his own house and most of his own hair. He was probably the only single man in the village under eighty who still fell into the ‘Would’ category, if he wasn’t flattering himself. Turned out, he wasn’t there for the entertainment after all. He was the support act.
The social started to thin out about eight, around about the time it became evident to everyone, even Mrs Millward, that the newcomer hadn’t taken up her invitation. The usual conversations about golf, the parish council, and teenagers drinking cider and doing who knew what else behind the war memorial had dried up.
By nine, thank God, The Bull was back to normal.
The tables were dragged back to their usual positions in the corners and around the fake fire; a hard-core of evening regulars propped up the bar and a smattering of walkers tucked into assorted things with chips in baskets. Retro, they probably thought, little knowing The Bull had been doing things in baskets since Moses and wasn’t likely to stop any time soon. Gil sat himself at his usual table, Liza’s phone number scribbled on a bar mat that dragged like a boulder in his jacket pocket. He hadn’t asked, she’d offered, around the time she’d said she should be making a move and he’d said, ‘See you again sometime.’ Politeness, wilfully mistaken for intent. Social niceties always did get you into trouble in his experience. She seemed nice, it wasn’t that. It was just that … Well, he wasn’t looking.
‘Well,’ Mrs Millward’s voice pulled Gil back, from the far side of the room where she nursed the same half-f glass of now warm white wine she’d been holding when he arrived. The same peach lipstick decorated the rim. ‘I call that plain rude, don’t you?’
‘Maybe she didn’t get the invitation,’ her husband said gently.
Unlikely, Gil thought. For a second it looked as though Margaret agreed and was about to say as much, but then she relented.
‘You could be right. I should have popped round again when she’d had a day or two to settle in. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re new to a neighbourhood. Or she could simply have lost her way.’
Nobody pointed out that only one road ran through the village and the pub was on it. The same road that ran right past the gates to the big house. You could get lost, Gil supposed, but he couldn’t for the life of him think how.
The next couple of days crawled by as most days had since the end of August. Gil got up with his alarm, as he did every day, dressed in his suit, as he did every day, and went to collect his regular order of milk, bread, papers, fags from the General Stores, as he did every day.
The only difference was the weather. Now the rain had finally stopped, the September mornings were growing darker, the evenings shorter, each day starting with dew and ending with an unexpected chill. He could see how giving up on things might happen. With nothing to make you, one day you might not bother to get up. Not until nine or even ten; and then the eight a.m. ritual would be broken. Would the suit be next? Just about flinging on his civvies in time for pub opening, barely managing to push a flannel round his face …
Yes, he could see how that could happen. A gradual erosion of routine that led … unintentionally his eye drifted to number 32. Since his wife had died, Bill’s life had shrunk. The Bull was the atom at its heart. At noon Bill was at the door, waiting to be let in, back again at six. If the landlord didn’t insist on keeping to the old hours, calling time at three Monday to Thursday, he’d probably never leave. As it was, Bill was always last out, drowning his dregs, calling for one more for the road and being gently refused.
Gil didn’t examine too closely how he knew the minutiae of Bill’s comings and goings, he just knew Bill made him uncomfortable.
Bill had kids, Gil knew that much. Presumably he still saw them. But why assume that? Gil had kids, but he wasn’t exactly round Lyn’s every weekend for tea. In fact, he’d be hard pushed to remember when he’d last seen her.
When he’d last heard from her.
Christmas, that would be. Plus a birthday card in May, the obligatory note saying you must drop over, you wouldn’t recognise the kids, etc. … He never took it as a real invitation, hadn’t for a year or two, maybe more. Then a text saying thank you for the kids’ birthday cards (cheque for £50, recently raised from £40, accompanied by a feeling that probably wasn’t enough and the definite sense he could no longer say with any degree of certainty how old they were).
Karen was another matter altogether. Gil didn’t know where to start with her. He wasn’t even 100 per cent sure what she looked like now; although since she’d been the spit of her mother as a little girl he imagined he could pick her out in a line-up. Truth be told, it depressed him just thinking about Karen. Oh, her mother knew her address … But then what? Turn up on Karen’s doorstep and say he was sorry how things turned out? As far as he knew, he was no longer Dad to her. That honour went to the man who’d fed and clothed her for the past twelve years. ‘The man who gave a damn.’ That’s how Jan put it the last time he phoned, her voice brittle, exasperated, done.
It was years ago now, but the damage, even then, was already done.
‘Just get Karen,’ he’d said for the third time in as many minutes, his hand gripping the receiver he’d used instead of his mobile so she couldn’t screen his number. ‘Just for five minutes. I haven’t spoken to her for months.’
‘Whose fault is that?’
‘She could have called me. She’s got hands, hasn’t she? A mobile phone.’
Nothing. Silence. He didn’t blame her. Didn’t now, hadn’t then.
‘I just. Want. To speak. To my daughter.’ His voice was rising, he couldn’t help it, even though he knew the rest of the top table at the paper were pretending not to listen in.
The sigh on the other end, hundreds of miles away at the far end of the M1, must have been audible all the way to production. ‘Well, she doesn’t want to speak to you.’
And then, his big mistake. ‘I have a right to speak to her. I’m her father.’
‘She’s sixteen. She gets to choose and she chooses not. You don’t have any rights, not where she’s concerned. And, even if you did, you’re not her father, not any more. Kevin is. He’s the man who gives a damn.’
The call ended with him standing at his office desk, breathing hard into the static of a dead line, his vision blurring and heart hammering as he thought of all the things he wanted to say. Like an idiot, not one of them was sorry. That conversation wasn’t something he was proud of. Looking back, he wasn’t sure how he’d let it happen. The same way he let everything happen, he supposed. Lost: one marriage and two children. One careless owner. It would take more than a Christmas card to put it right with Karen. God knew he’d tried that route enough times.
Up ahead, Gil saw Bill’s familiar shape vanishing through The Bull’s front door.
‘Dot of twelve,’ he muttered, side-swerving into the doorway of the General Stores. Sugar, that was it, he was out of sugar. If not sugar, something else. There had to be something he needed. Something that would stop him being through the door of The Bull five seconds after the local joke.
‘It’s not catching, you know,’ Gil told himself. ‘You can’t get old and sad and unwashed and drunk by osmosis.’ But he couldn’t shake the fear that … Well, what if you could? He was only sixty-one. Bill Grimes had a good ten years on him, if not more. But somehow Gil was horribly afraid that Bill Grimes was his future. His ghosts of Christmases, springs, summers, autumns and pints yet to come. The spectre of the wreck Gil Markham could be if he didn’t cave in and take up golf or book a cruise or do whatever it was retirees like him were meant to do to keep themselves sane.
Voluntary retirement, he thought bitterly. What a joke. Nothing bloody voluntary about it.
He bought sugar, in case he’d really run out, and a magazine about the Dales he hadn’t seen before and suspected wouldn’t be around for more than a couple of issues. Just as he was closing the door behind him, a battered Peugeot 205 squealed to a near halt. If there’d been a pavement the car would have mounted it. As it was, it lurched to a stop centimetres from his feet.
‘What the …?’
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. I only just got this and its brakes don’t seem to work very well.’
The young woman who threw open the driver’s door, almost doing him a second injury, looked harassed, a bit like Lyn when she’d had her babies under each arm. Although this woman was minus babies. On second glance, she didn’t look much like Lyn at all. For a start, Lyn was blonde, bottle-blonde these days, or had been last time he saw her, and this girl – woman, he corrected himself – had wavy brown hair to her shoulders, and freckles. She did have Lyn’s slender build though, the same harassed air and perplexed V between her eyebrows that he’d already told Lyn would set into wrinkles with age. In her nondescript jeans, trainers and parka, without a scrap of make-up, she could have been ten years younger than his daughter. The lines radiating from her eyes suggested she was older.
‘Or at all,’ she added, as if she hadn’t paused. ‘Plus I’m a crap driver. And I hate cars.’
Gil started to smile, opened his mouth to tell her it really didn’t matter, no one was dead, but she was already gone, pushing past him into The Stores as if working to a deadline. With nothing better to do, Gil followed.
‘Back again so soon, Mr Markham?’ Mrs Millward said it as if someone had pressed F8 on a computer keyboard and this was the default line. Gil forced a smile and was wondering whether he could be bothered to answer when he saw that she wasn’t looking at him any more. Her mega-watt attention swivelling to the woman who’d entered ahead of him.
If Margaret Millward had been a teacher she’d have been one of those who could silence a class just by looking up from her desk. She had that effect now. Even Jeremy Vine, blaring from the radio behind the till, seemed to ratchet his voice down a little in deference. ‘Mademoiselle Graham?’ There was a pause. A split second when every head in the shop – and there weren’t that many – turned to look at the newcomer, then a beat, perhaps two, before he saw the woman’s shoulders visibly tense through the thin fabric of her coat.
‘It is, isn’t it?’ Mrs Millward’s voice was triumphant. ‘It’s Mademoiselle Graham, the new tenant up at Wildfell. I knew we’d get to see you eventually.’
Who?
That was Helen’s first thought.
She almost looked behind her, then she realised there was no need, everyone in the shop was transfixed by just one person: her.