Breaking Light (33 page)

She was surprised that no one had ever commented; surely somebody must have noticed the awful green bruises that would sink slowly down her face like stones caught in ice. She had become accustomed to keeping her head down, but she hated it every time she had to go back to the Stagstead chemist – the look of concern – or apathy, for that matter – on the faces of the ignorant assistants as she asked for the various items of selfmedication. They were hoping to become pharmacists themselves one day, no doubt, or even beauticians, aromatherapists, that kind of thing. Hopeless, stupid girls.

The bus came around the corner just as she reached the crossroads and the driver – it was Mr Carpenter – having spotted her, slowed down and waited for her to reach the bus stop. That was kind.

‘Morning, Mrs Ludgate,' he said, cheerfully, as she climbed the steep steps. ‘Going for a bit of a shopping spree today, are we?'

‘Shopping spree, my posterior!' she spat through her pinkest lipstick, and pulled her hat further over her face. ‘There's only
rubbish to buy in Mortford. If I wanted to shop, I'd go to stay with my daughter in Exeter.'

‘Oh, dear; it's one of them days, is it?' said the driver, but not unkindly.

Mrs Ludgate wobbled down the aisle and found her seat at the back. The bus was empty, apart from a couple of ramblers. Foreigners, for sure – they had that smell about them. Garlic and suchlike. As the bus started moving, she held on to the seat in front with both hands, her feet in the white trainers barely touching the floor, and thought about the task at hand. Now, Rowden's sold foundation, she was quite sure of it. Not Rimmel, of course, one could not hope for that, but some other brand, surely? She wondered if the girl at the till would find it untoward if she bought two tubes at once – perhaps, if they were different shades, a lighter and a darker … Yes, that was the way to do it. She wondered, at times, what other women did; this must be a common pursuit, after all, as normal powder would not offer enough coverage. Over the years, she had often wished that she had a friend, somebody with whom she could discuss such issues. But it was not the kind of thing one talked about at the Women's Institute, for instance. Lately, the discussion there had mainly been concerned with the plight of the honeybee. The initial, slightly over-agitated lamentations about the decrease of the bee population had soon been abandoned for talk about recipes for honey cake. She did not care for honey cake but she didn't mind bees and, without telling anyone, she had planted a patch of foxgloves and larkspurs in the kitchen garden up at the farm. There, by midsummer, they had stretched proudly, pink and blue, against the grey stone wall, like a festival of medieval knights. One morning in July, when she was all alone – her
husband away in London – she had sat for hours in the grass, her legs stretched out like a child's, watching the bees as they dipped in and out of the bright thimbles, wearing the flowers like tiny wizard's hats. She had been so overwhelmed by a sense of achievement – to think that it was her planting that dressed these creatures – it had made her cry, silly bint that she was. She liked the bumblebees best, the way their fuzzy bums would stick out of the flowers as they dipped their tongues into the nectar. Their look of dusted bewilderment as the pollen gilded their pelt reminded her of the slick and dewy meadows on the cliffs of her youth and filled her with a sudden and inexplicable longing. Identical at first, the closer she observed the bees, the more individual they appeared. Most wore the same bands of black and yellow with the soft white scut, but some had more yellow, almost red, and some were nearly all black. And the buzzing! The beautiful buzzing of the bumblebee, the abandon, the lust, the soothing softness of that summer sound as they all bumbled away, buzzing for joy in that most still and perfect of mornings.

It was November now and the moor was at its grimmest. Some of the farmers had started the swaling, the annual burning of the bracken and the gorse. There were large patches of ashy grey amongst the auburn bracken. A few sheep, blackened by the sooty undergrowth, stared at the bus as it passed on the road. She resented them and the way they threatened to draw her down into some undergrowth realm of bluebottle flies and slugs. She could not stand their mindless gaze, empty of everything but some deep-rooted instinct – panic, perhaps, or some other stinking drudge.

‘It hurts me, too,' he used to say, in the beginning. ‘Can't you see you're spoiling the fun?' Back then, she did not seem to have
much fun – nor much of a future. Would death have been a way out? She might have thrown herself in front of the bus. It would have been easy enough, as the driver would not have spotted her as he came around the bend towards Stanton's Cross, at least not in the summer, when the hedges were high. It was a dangerous crossing, people said. But why, she had asked herself, would I do that? I am already crushed. She could have hanged herself, but her breath, she had been told, was a waste of time, so what would have been the point of that? There were other ways, she knew, to end one's life, but she had been too tired at the time to think of them – and never vain enough. And then there had been the girl – the daughter she had secretly named for a lighter existence.

Suddenly she remembered the book of photographs she had seen in the professor's drawing room. There had been women there – and men, for that matter – wearing make-up, but the photographs had stripped them of their masks. Not in a ruthless way, but almost tenderly. That woman photographer, whom the professor liked so much, would surely have known about the use of foundation;
she
would not have wasted her time talking about the plight of the honeybee, silk-ribbon embroidery and macramé. She would have
seen
.

They had been relatively well off, at times. Not rich, mind you, but there had been enough – enough money for his weekends away along the coast or his long stays down in London. There had always been electricity and hot water up at the farm, and he had had the roof of the old barn replaced, although they no longer kept any cattle. The barn was where he stored his merchandise. He was better off as a businessman than as a farmer, he had explained to her once. Not that he ever talked to her about
his business – nor of the property deals, of course – but she had managed to find out a thing or two for herself. He would buy cheaply from old widows and sell dearly to Londoners and golfing entrepreneurs. People, mainly the relatives of the old widows, would get cross with him from time to time, even upset. She knew this because they would sometimes ring up and shout down the line. But he would only put on his charms, the ones that made people afraid of him, and, afterwards, he would smile and hum to himself. ‘It went for a song, Granny's bungalow did – a fucking song!' But then, a few years ago, there had been no more singing or dancing. His business had turned for the worse. He had never allowed her to work – to have a proper job outside the house. She chuckled to herself as she thought about what her husband might have said about her job at the professor's – at Gabriel Askew's – who was not just a stranger to her husband, after all. Oh, no – no stranger at all. She shivered at the thought and yet she was strangely pleased.

Suddenly, she stirred and grabbed her handbag that sat perkily on the seat next to her. She opened the oversized metal clasp with a click and looked inside, rummaging nervously through the jumble of lipsticks, old bus tickets, Kleenex, a miniature bottle of Jägermeister and a couple of postcards that she had never sent to Exeter. Then she found what she was looking for and relaxed. It was a piece of paper – a document that she had found when clearing out her husband's filing cabinet a few weeks previously. She was surprised that there were still some documents left in the house. Throughout their marriage, she had avoided knowing about her husband's business. But lately, since the professor arrived in the village, something – a sliver of a memory from the time before her fate was sealed – had made her want
to find out more. She had no idea what she had been looking for, but this particular file had caught her eye immediately. It puzzled her – she could not make head nor tail of it – but, as far as she could tell, it seemed to suggest that the professor had bought Oakstone from her husband, that Jim of Blackaton had been sitting on the deeds to the house for years – just holding on to it. If he had been letting it, she had not been aware of it. As far as she knew, the house had been boarded up. It seemed almost perverse. There was an entire file just on Oakstone. How was it possible? Where could he have got hold of the deeds? There was no way he could ever have afforded to buy that house – that much she realised – not a grade two listed house. She had been thinking about it for weeks. Perhaps, today, once she had bought the foundation at Rowden's, she would bring herself to ask Mr Askew about the strange document.

The road turned off the moor and followed the stream down into the valley, where the hedges were still thick, if not lush, and the oaks and the elms, old and wise above the bus, heralded the approach with their autumn colours. This was good – it was all fine – and she could already see the tower of Mortford church ahead – solid, reassuring. And the stone in her chest began to float.

*

Later that afternoon, Mr Askew watched her toiling up the drive. From where he was standing vigilantly by the French windows, he imagined he heard her heavy breathing – a plump person's breathing – as she pushed on up the gravel, where the potholes were mud-thick and un-drained. A green and white plastic bag from Rowden's was dangling from her left wrist and that ridiculously large handbag of hers was swinging heavily from
the other; every now and again it would bang against her right thigh. He gazed up beyond her as a weak sun broke through the drab November sky for a moment. A couple of bare branches on the huge trees at the end of the garden were black against the marbled background of greys and whites. Their trunks were barbed in ivy – like strings of broken lyres.

He had listened to a programme on Radio Four that morning about migratory thrushes – how they would fly south from Britain in November, only to be trapped and caught by hunters in eastern Spain and served as tapas in local restaurants. Bird-watchers were quite reasonably upset about this, but the Spanish were unmoved, claiming that their practice was an unbroken cultural heritage going back to Roman times – a tradition that must be encouraged, according to some EU policy about regional growth. ‘Some blessed hope,' Mr Askew muttered to himself and shook his head before turning his mind to the lucky songbirds who managed to avoid the Spanish glue traps and flew on to North Africa; how, come spring, a handful of them would home in on those trees at the end of his garden and travel thousands of miles to find this very spot again. Lucky birds, to believe in home, to have such an instinct for belonging. The whole thing baffled him.

He turned away from it and, with a long sigh, lowered his eyes once more to the outlandish figure of Mrs Ludgate – who was nowhere to be seen. She seemed to have disappeared into thin air, quite literally. He blinked. ‘What the—' he began, greatly annoyed, but broke off abruptly as her face suddenly appeared right in front of him, pressed against the windowpane. They were inches apart, only separated by the glass. For an unsettling moment, he was forced to look straight into her eyes. They
were of a peculiar violet blue and somehow angry, but there was something else, too, something which he could not quite place. ‘Argh!' he barked, involuntarily. Mrs Ludgate looked equally perturbed, but she collected herself quickly and pointed sternly towards the front door, the plastic carrier from Rowden's swinging like a punchbag. Her face was an odd colour, he noticed, and blotchy like the bark of a beech tree, and there was a drop at the end of her nose. It glittered briefly in the weak sun.

He walked through to the hall and opened the door to her. ‘For God's sake, woman!' The shock of seeing her face so close was still ripe in him. ‘Why are you sneaking around like this?'

‘I rang the bell, didn't I?' she yelled back, equally frazzled. ‘You gone deaf, or something? Or was your head in the clouds, as per usual?'

Had he really not heard the bell? Perhaps he
was
going deaf – or did he let himself drift too far away at times? ‘Anyway,' he said in a calmer voice, ‘it's not Friday, is it? I didn't expect to see you.'

‘No, well, I'm not here to work.'

‘Oh?'

‘I've come on a matter of business.'

‘Ah,' he said, and felt a thickening in his throat.

‘A matter that concerns yourself.'

‘You'd better come inside, then,' he said, stepping aside to let her pass.

To his alarm, she pushed right past him with unsettling determination and fell back into one of the armchairs by the cold fireplace with a great ‘Humph!'

He stood for a moment, huge and mute, like a forest troll, before following her, hesitantly, into the drawing room.

‘Well, then, is there any chance of a cup of tea?' she asked, and pulled her fleece jacket over her breasts. ‘Or would that be too much trouble?'

He did not reply, but left the room promptly. When he returned, carrying the teacups and a few biscuits on a tray, she had settled into the chair with an air of importance. She was holding a folded paper in her lap. He placed the tray on a rickety side table and sat down in the chair opposite her. He considered the marble of the mantelpiece and the gilded mirror above it, reflecting their silence, and tried to think of something to say. ‘Well, here we are …' he said softly, and smiled at nothing in particular. A dried twig with acorn, which he had picked up on one of his walks, was leaning against the little china clock on the mantelpiece; it was as brown and drab as the day.

She looked at him with something he interpreted as contempt, although it might just as well have been the opposite, before bending forward to help herself to a biscuit from the tray.