Authors: Sam Baker
As she opened her mouth and then closed it again, another thought occurred to her: How the hell did the woman know she was
her?
Not that anyone with half a brain couldn’t have worked it out by process of elimination, she supposed. Who she was, that is. But not what she looked like. How had this bossy little woman put two and two together and come up with Helen? In a village alive with passing traffic, which, for the past week, she had tried so hard not to be part of …
Not one to be put off, the woman kept staring pointedly.
Well?
said her expression.
Well?
The small shop swam with faces. Helen felt the air constrict, her brain doing a go-slow while she tried to take them in. The blanking thing was an all too common occurrence these days. She couldn’t think straight. But it was obvious which of the faces staring at her, watching and waiting, mattered. The busybody behind the till. Helen could tell just by looking that she – Margaret Millward, it had to be, she of the village social – was the very worst kind. Not harmless, that’s for sure. Pathologically interested in other people’s business; now examining someone pathologically interested in not being examined.
‘
Oui
, madame,’ she managed eventually.
Just her luck there were other people in the shop. Two old women, properly old, purple-tinged hair and dowagers’ humps, both with wire baskets on flimsy wheel-along trollies. A young mum – young-ish, younger than Helen anyway – her old-school pram blocking one of three aisles. Then there was the man. The one she’d nearly run over outside. He was standing right behind her. Towering over her, not cowed by his own height, so she tried not to be. The fact he was lanky helped her not to tense. He was too close for comfort, but it wasn’t his fault. In an attempt to physically remove herself as far as possible from Margaret Millward’s orbit, she’d backed into his space. Close enough to see the pinstripe suit he wore was expensive, tailor-made. Close enough to see he wasn’t as old as she’d first imagined. And close enough, she realised, for him to see how her fists had clenched, jagged nails cutting half-moons into the fleshy part of her palms.
‘
Parlez-vous anglais?
’ he asked.
The bossy woman behind the counter looked impressed.
Helen shifted from foot to foot, cursing herself inwardly. A loaf of bread for God’s sake! Outed by a hankering for toast and Marmite. She should have been less greedy and stayed home, or less lazy and driven further. Either would have been better than this.
Margaret Millward was still looking at her, if anything, her curiosity piqued all the more by Helen’s silence; head tilted to the side, ready to deploy sympathy and understanding the second Helen spoke.
What Helen wanted to say was, Fuck off. Mind your own business. She wanted to tell the woman where to stick her nose and her General Stores and her only loaf of bread and fresh milk for a five-mile radius. She didn’t, of course. Hélène Graham wasn’t a fuck-off kind of girl. She was
bon chic, bon gen
. Tough as nails, but with the
grandes écoles
manners of someone descended from someone with a metro station named after them.
Her Helen Lawrence fuck-you days were behind her.
‘Yes!’ she said brightly, ditching any pretence of a French accent. ‘Fluently.’ There was no point making life harder than it already was by having to pretend to speak pidgin English every time she ran out of milk.
It was as if the whole shop – even Jeremy Vine who’d been chatting to himself from the transistor behind the till – exhaled and started pretending to go on about its business;
pretending
being the operative word. They may no longer be looking, but Helen could tell every last one of them was listening. Even the man in the suit, who looked as if he’d escaped from an episode of
Yes, Minister
and wandered into
Emmerdale
by mistake.
‘You must be Mrs …’ Helen paused, pretending to search for a name that was on the very tip of her tongue if she could only …
‘Margaret, dear,’ Mrs Millward said, as Helen had known she would. They always did, her type. ‘Margaret Millward. But you should call me Margaret.’
To her right, the man’s shoulders shook and then he sneezed, a fake little atishoo, Helen thought, forced out, too little too late. ‘Bless you, Mr Markham,’ said the woman.
‘Thank you,’ he muttered.
At least, Helen thought that was what he muttered.
‘We were very sorry not to see you, dear,’ Margaret Millward said slowly, clearly determined to persist in her idea that Helen could not understand.
Helen stared back, trying to keep her face blank. Confused was the look she was after, but rude would do. Anything was better than what she felt, which was thirteen all over again and trapped in the school loos by one of those girls who had the teachers believing butter wouldn’t melt. They were everywhere, life’s Margaret Millwards: plaguing infants’ schools and colleges, offices and school gates – who knew, probably nursing homes too. The type who, when you met them for the first time, looked you up and down, taking you in head-to-toe, every hair out of place, every scrap of mud on your boots, every stain you thought successfully sponged off. That type, thought Helen, but Margaret Millward’s interest felt more dangerous. She wasn’t looking for mud and split ends and smudged mascara. She was looking for the cracks below the surface. Although, God knows, Helen thought, there should be enough cracks on the surface to keep her going.
‘I’m sorry,’ Helen said, when it became clear that she was about to lose her second face-off of the week. ‘You were expecting me?’
‘Thursday evening.’
‘I’m sorry?’ she repeated.
‘I sent you a letter. An
invitation
.’
Helen rearranged her face into its best imitation of sudden recognition. ‘The blue letter?’
The woman nodded, looking halfway between exasperated and intrigued.
‘Ah. I’m sorry,’ Helen said. ‘I didn’t realise … The rain … it was destroyed. The ink was unreadable. My headaches were too bad. When they come I just have to lie in a darkened room and wait for them to pass.’ Understatement of the year, but broadly true.
‘Oh, you poor thing. You should have said. Shouldn’t she have said, Mary?’
One of the old women waiting at the till nodded vigorously.
‘Have you got a mobile number?’ Mrs Millward asked. ‘Might be useful for someone else around here to have it. In case you need anything. If you get headaches a lot, I mean. You don’t want to be stuck out there in that huge house on your own, with no food or company. What if you need help? It’s not as if you’d be able to drive, and it would be no trouble. Honestly, no trouble at all.’
Helen had to admit she was impressed. In another life this woman would have made a great journalist, of a certain kind.
‘Thank you, but there’s really no need,’ she said. ‘The signal out there is hopeless. But thank you, so much. That’s very thoughtful of you. Really, though … when they come – the headaches, I mean – there’s nothing anyone can do to help. I just have to stay in bed and get better. And eating …’ Helen made a face that she hoped made it clear they would not want to know what effect eating might have. ‘Eating is the last thing on my mind.’
Margaret Millward nodded reluctantly before saying brightly, ‘Well, now you’ve found us, I hope we’ll see you in here much more often.’
Recognising an order when she heard one, Helen pasted on her most polite smile. ‘I’m sure you will.’
‘And you will come to the next social, won’t you?’ Mrs Millward said, pressing her advantage as Helen sidled towards the bread shelf. Sliced white or sliced white. After all that, any locally baked loaves – assuming there had ever been any – were long gone.
‘Of course,’ she said, picking up a local paper and putting it down again. Instead she replaced it in her pile with a large bar of Galaxy and balanced a box of Rice Krispies on top. ‘When is it?’
‘First Thursday of the month,’ the woman said, almost sharply, as if repeating the same instruction for an inattentive small child. Then she softened. ‘But don’t worry about that now. It’s much too far away to remember. I’ll drop a note through your door nearer the time. I’ll bring a cake and we can have a cup of tea.’
With her heart beating against her ribs like a bird trying to fight free of its cage, it took Helen another five minutes to extricate herself.
Finally free, she flung her shopping on to the passenger seat. It took three goes to fire the engine into life and, when it started, it sounded like a bastard cross between a tractor and a motorbike. Still, what did she expect for £300 and less than six months left to run on the MOT? She’d taken the handbrake off and had it in gear when one of the old women barrelled out of the shop door and wheeled her trolley straight in front of the car.
Shit! Helen slammed her foot on the brakes, grateful that this time they worked. Mind you, the way she felt right then, an old lady or two would have been justifiable collateral damage.
The vein in her temple throbbed ominously. She couldn’t face going straight back to the house. Huge as it was, it was still too confining. Even the thought of walls made her feel claustrophobic.
Helen had never been a popper inner, for tea or otherwise. Home was a sanctuary. Wasn’t that the theory? A place you were supposed to be free from other people; their presence and their opinions. Even if it didn’t feel that way to you – and Helen couldn’t honestly say it ever had; except, maybe, once, for a short time as a small child – you had to respect people who did. Regardless of whether their home no longer had a roof or a ceiling or a front door, and there was a hole in the wall where the window used to be, and a pile of rubble in what remained of the kitchen, the overwhelming reek of cordite to remind them that this would never really be a home again. Despite all that, you could stand on the street and watch what was left of a family huddled together over a pan of boiling water, trying to rebuild some semblance of normality, some sense of home.
Not now.
Helen shook the image from her head. Even if she had known where home was, she couldn’t imagine ever being there again.
The little Peugeot sped past the house without pausing. It clearly had no intention of pulling in, even if Helen had. But she felt no calling, no lure of kettle or sofa. None of the emotions that people often told her they associated with home. It was just a house, sprawling and empty. With little but climate, local language and location to distinguish it from other ruins she’d inhabited.
At the next T-junction the car took a right turn to Harrogate almost before she’d had a chance to decide. It was a bit of a drive but it wasn’t as if she was short of time. She could stop there for the afternoon. Helen tried to picture herself buying a book and sitting in a tea room reading it, whiling away several hours eating toasted teacake and drinking Earl Grey from a proper cup and saucer, probably white and adorned with flowers, the sort of fine bone china you could bite through. Wasn’t that the kind of thing people used to do? The kind of thing plenty of people still did, without smartphones or one eye constantly on the news sites?
She could picture the scene. She just couldn’t picture herself in it.
At the crossroads for the abbey the car made up her mind for her and took the opposite turn. Whether it was the car or Helen, suddenly she knew she didn’t need tea and cake and more people to watch. She didn’t need smaller, she needed bigger. Something far bigger, far older, more significant than her.
She entered the village from the south, passing a caravan park and a car park, a hot-dog kiosk, a café-cum-gift shop, and a tawdry concrete block of public conveniences. The indisputable ugliness that tourism inevitably spawned. Clearly this wasn’t the remote ruin she’d been hoping for. But the weather gods were watching over her and, as the Peugeot pulled into a space, the mizzle that had hung over the Dales all morning hardened its resolve, sending brightly coloured cagoules scattering for their coaches.
Shoving the ancient guidebook to Yorkshire into the glove compartment, Helen tossed the hood of her parka over her frizz, put her head down and beetled across the emptying tarmac into the village that surrounded the abbey. If her guidebook had been printed in the last century, not the one before, she might have known the priory was no longer the remote thousand-year-old ruin it described but the beating heart of a tourist centre, pumping the blood of outsiders and their credit cards around the surrounding villages and into the arteries of the Dales.
The priory, like the village that bore its name, and the countryside shrouding it, was schizophrenic. The face it showed the village was a working parish church, all neat grey stone façade, scrubbed and polished, surrounded by clipped lawns. More village green than thousand years of history.
There were no ghosts here. She should have been relieved.
Passing a blackboard bearing the legend,
Guided Tours 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.,
Helen glanced at her watch. It was nearly two. Lucky, she was between tours.
Beyond the sign, she skirted the abbey’s soaring façade and ducked under a weathered buttress. As she cut around the side of the abbey, pristine stonework gave way to crumbling panels open to slate-grey sky. Here were the remains the guidebook had promised: a grand building left to decay after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. Its destruction accelerated by the valley’s inhabitants who decided, not unreasonably Helen felt, that a deserted priory’s stone could be put to better use in their own walls.
A last, bedraggled group of tourists hurried past, so bent on their search for somewhere dry to wait for the next tour that they hardly seemed to notice her. Perhaps the khaki of her parka rendered her invisible against the stone, compared to the primary reds, blues and yellows they were used to. Good. She’d had enough of people for one lifetime.
Tucking a stray strand of hair into her hood, Helen stuffed her hands in her pockets and walked into the squall. Back here, swept under the priory’s neatly vacuumed carpet, were the jagged teeth of a ruin. Centuries of rain and snow had exposed the building’s intestines to the elements, leaving them vulnerable and bruised. Arches soared skywards, their skeleton stripped bare of most of what made the building live.