Encounters

by Barbara Erskine

  Then at last when all was ready and every footprint banished from the lawn, a hush descended on the assembled company.

  ‘It really is a pretty house, isn’t it?’ Mike whispered softly as they watched Jim Dixon, nattily dressed in Regency costume, mount the rangy black cob which had been backed out of the horse box and ride up to the gate as the cameras started to whirr.

  The sun sparkled on the snow, winking in the windows. Suddenly Tessa stiffened. ‘Mike, look! At the top. The end room. There’s somebody there!’

  Mike frowned up at the house, screwing up his eyes. ‘Where?’

  ‘There, There.’ She pointed. ‘Quick, stop them filming. It must be him. We must catch him.’

  Her voice had risen sharply and she saw Sanders and Dave, his production assistant, frowning at her. The camera stopped and Jim reined in his horse.

  ‘Problem?’ he said, smiling down at her.

  ‘There’s someone there. Up there.’ She pointed at the house.

  Everyone turned to look but the windows were blank.

  ‘Do you want a couple of the boys to take a look with you?’ Sanders turned to Mike. Only, for Pete’s sake, go round the back! Don’t make any more footmarks, OK?’

  Tessa bit her lip. ‘I’m sure I saw a face,’ she said as they watched the three men making their way cautiously round behind the barn.

  ‘Could be a trick of the light, the windows are full of reflections.’ Jim grinned at her reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry, if there is anyone there, they’ll find him.’

  There was no one and Tessa, scarlet with embarrassment, subsided behind Mike to watch the proceedings in silence.

  It was growing dark when the last of the equipment was packed up and the cars and vans eventually rolled away. Tired, Mike and Tessa went back into the house and set about relighting the fire in the chilly kitchen, drawing the curtains against the twilit lawn which was now crossed and recrossed with slushy footprints.

  ‘Tea?’ Tessa filled the kettle at the tap and plugged it in as Mike knelt at the hearth, feeding kindling into the small new fire.

  They heard no more from the film people until one night the phone rang. Mike went to answer it. He was gone a long time and after a while Tessa looked up from her book, gazing into the fire listening. She could hear him wandering up and down upstairs.

  When at last he reappeared he was looking rather odd.

  ‘What is it?’ Her book fell unnoticed in her lap.

  ‘That was Pete Sanders, he said quietly. ‘He wanted to tell us when the film was going to be on.’ He paused. There was something else too. He said that the film showed quite clearly the face you saw at the window.’

  Tessa gasped. ‘You mean the burglar?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No. Our other theory seems to be the right one. It was a child. A little girl.’

  Tessa stared at him, ‘A little girl?’

  He nodded. ‘In the end room on the top floor. That’s where you saw it, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. What bloody cheek! How on earth does she get in? Oh, Mike,’ she suddenly thought of something, ‘does that mean they’ll have to do the film again?’

  ‘No. There’s no time. They can edit her out,’ he said. ‘Strange isn’t it, though, that we found no one?’

  He sat down beside her again. ‘I suppose we ought to go and have another look round. I was thinking in terms of rowdy teenagers smoking pot up there or something, not a little girl.’

  ‘I thought you were up there just now.’ She reopened her book.

  ‘Just now? No, I was on the phone.’

  They stared at each other in silence for a second. Then reluctantly he hauled himself to his feet again, ‘I just checked the door too. She must have got in some other way this time. Come on.’

  The hall light revealed the solid oak door still securely shut and bolted. The house was completely silent. They stood looking upstairs for a moment, then side by side, they began to climb.

  Systematically they searched the first floor and then they stopped, looking up the narrow attic staircase. ‘Go on, you’ve got to look,’ Tessa whispered. For some reason her voice had gone husky.

  Mike walked up slowly with Tessa close behind him and pushed open the first door, clicking on the light. The naked bulb swung gently, reflecting in the back window panes. But the room was empty. As was the next.

  ‘This is the one,’ he whispered outside the last door.’

  He pushed it open hard and threw the light switch.

  The room was empty. They both went in and looked around. The room was small with one square window in the eaves. Like the others it had a deep window seat and a wall cupboard in the alcove beside the empty fireplace and it smelled of damp and disuse.

  They looked round carefully.

  ‘This must have been a nursery,’ Tessa whispered. ‘Look at the wallpaper.’ She pulled open the warped cupboard and peered inside. A few bits of broken china lay on the dusty shelf paper and on one top shelf a heap of material. She reached up.

  ‘Mike, look!’

  Mike had been examining the window latch. He turned.

  ‘Look. A genuine Victorian doll. Oh, isn’t she beautiful?’

  The waxen face was delicately painted and the dusty ringlets tied with threadbare blue ribbon.

  ‘How on earth did she get here? I’m sure she wasn’t here before.’ She took the doll to the stark light and peered at her.

  ‘Perhaps she belongs to the little girl at the window,’ Mike said laughing. ‘Come on, it’s cold up here. Let’s go down. There’s no one here now.’

  Tessa turned to follow him. Then she glanced down at the doll in her hand and she shivered.

  She took it to the window seat and gently propped it in the corner. ‘I think I’ll leave her here,’ she said.

  She followed Mike to the door and then turned to glance back at the room, her hand on the light switch. The doll had fallen sideways on the window seat.

  The house was very quiet. Mike had taken the car into town and Tessa was sitting at her sewing machine in the dark kitchen, the only light falling from the table lamp on the folds of the deep red curtain she was making. Outside it was snowing again. Standing up stiffly at last she turned on the radio while she made herself a cup of coffee. Then she sat down again to her curtains. The cheerful hum of the motor and the little warm patch of light which centred around her guiding fingers took all her attention and slowly she relaxed again.

  The child must have been peering through a crack in the kitchen door. She heard a smothered giggle and as she pushed her chair back in fright across the flags the sound of feet running up the stairs away from her.

  She flung back the door and peered into the hall. The front door was closed and bolted.

  Tessa went up the stairs two at a time. On the landing she stopped. There was complete silence from the top floor. She went on up, not giving herself time to think, heading straight for the nursery.

  The room was empty. She hesitated, looking round. The doll was lying on the floor now, in the corner.

  ‘Are you there?’ she called. ‘Come on. I won’t hurt you. I just want to talk to you.’

  She went over and picked up the doll. On its flaxen curls was a little wreath of daisies. They were real, the delicate petals tinged with pink. She carried the doll to the window and looked out. The garden was still inches deep in snow.

  And then she understood. She glanced round and suddenly her hands were shaking. ‘You live here, don’t you,’ she said out loud wonderingly. ‘You’re not one of the village children at all.’

  She glanced down at the daisies in her hand and then gently twined them back in the doll’s hair. Behind her the room was silent.

  Below, in the lane, she saw a car drawing to a standstill. She frowned, wondering who it was and then she saw Mr Forbes, the house agent, climbing stiffly out. He stood for a moment gazing up at the house.

  Carefully putting down the doll Tessa turned to go out and m
eet him.

  She knew now why he hadn’t mentioned the vicar’s secret visitor to them before – and what he was going to tell her. She hoped he would know her name.

  She wondered suddenly if Pete Sanders had kept the edited bit of the film showing the face at the window. She hoped so. It might be the only chance she would ever have of seeing the dead child properly.

  Someone to Dream About

  How she came to fall from the horse she never really knew. She was galloping alone across the moors, her hair streaming out behind her, exhilarated by the huge, building masses of clouds on the horizon, feeling the electricity in the air, when suddenly she was conscious of a car travelling fast on the lonely moorland road some distance away from her. For a split second it distracted her attention – an intrusive, twentieth-century jar on her nerves as the sky was torn by the first wishbone of lightning – and in that second Moonlight swerved and, stumbling on a branch of wiry heather, threw Margot clear before falling heavily to the ground.

  For a moment Margot lay stunned, feeling the first of the rain on her face, then, slowly, she began to climb to her feet, the exhilaration of the ride knocked out of her by the fall; her dream shattered.

  Scotland had always brought out the dreamer in Margot. She would forget the image which was the Margot of London. Behind a desk as personal assistant to a high-powered financial director she was a competent woman, at ease with office technology, her hair bound sleekly to her head, her clothes businesslike, her shoes immaculate. There she was independent, seeking to taste everything the city had to offer: theatre, concerts, galleries, meals with carefully-selected men who shared her taste in food and wine – which often she would choose, not they. The men were purely decorative, to be kept at arm’s length; her liberation total because she had allowed herself no possibility of involvement. That was how she saw it; commitment meant loss of freedom and to her, freedom was life itself.

  At Inverglen she shed that image, as a snake sloughs its skin. There she found true freedom. She would put away the heels and the narrow skirts, let her hair loose and run wild. Then the thing she loved most, riding, became her obsession, every penny of her savings going to the hire of a horse for the whole of her holiday, while her London friends went skiing, or lounged on beaches in France and Portugal. And it was on the horse – a beautiful silver mare named Moonlight – that she would relive, secretly, all the fantasy lives of her childhood. She was Rob Roy, Flora Macdonald, Robin Hood, Boudicca, hero or heroine as the mood took her. Free, Alive.

  If anyone had guessed about her secret life she would have died of shame. But there was no one to see her wild rides across the moors towards the high granite cliffs where the sea crashed onto rocks, slick with spray even in the gentlest weather. If her grandmother, Thea, guessed what went on in Margot’s head, she never gave a sign.

  It was a moment before Margot realized that the car had stopped a few hundred yards away and that a figure was loping over the heather towards her.

  But he went straight to the struggling horse, his hands gentling the animal’s fear, calming it as sweat poured off the satin coat, his strong, slender fingers feeling the animal’s shoulder and on down the leg, not even glancing at her.

  ‘Is her leg broken?’ Margot heard her own voice, astonishingly calm, as she staggered towards the mare.

  He looked up at her then, for a fraction of a second. His hair was plastered to his face, his jacket and shirt black with the now driving rain. The swift, dismissive glance told her that his eyes were violently blue and that they were blazing with anger.

  ‘Small thanks to you if it isn’t!’ he snapped. ‘Are you crazy or something? Riding at that speed over this ground – and in this light? Have you no common sense?’

  ‘I’ll ride my own horse on my own land how I damn well please,’ she cried furiously. It was quite unlike her. She would never talk like that to anyone; it sounded absurd, arrogant and callous and she was none of those things. But for him now she would be all, and worse. ‘What were you doing here, anyway?’ she went on, her voice rising in the wind. ‘That is a private road. If you hadn’t been there and distracted me, it wouldn’t have happened. She’d have been all right.’

  Shock was beginning to hit her now. She could feel herself beginning to shake. Furiously she dug her hands deep into her pockets of her jacket, ‘I’m sorry. I suppose I should thank you for stopping. Her voice sounded ungracious and harsh.

  ‘And walking on your land,’ He was still bending down, his back to her, but there was no mistaking the mockery in his voice.

  ‘That’s right. On my land!’ She suddenly wanted to cry. She ached all over from the fall, she was soaked through and very cold.

  As if reading her thoughts he stood up abruptly and turned to face her. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Perfectly.’ To her relief, her tone was remarkably steady.

  ‘Good. Because this horse cain’t be ridden like this. You’ll have to lead her.’

  ‘I realize that,’ She put her hand tentatively to the mare’s muzzle.

  He did not relinquish his hold. ‘If this is your land –’ was there a slight emphasis on the words? ‘– you live presumably at Inverglen House. That’s a couple of miles. You’ll have to take it very slowly.’

  ‘I’ll manage.’ She gritted her teeth and in spite of herself hesitated. It was the arrogance about him which made her hackles rise – but it was an arrogance which matched her own. Obviously and perhaps rightly, he despised her. That interested her.

  ‘You still haven’t told me what you were doing here,’ she couldn’t resist saying over her shoulder as she turned the mare.

  ‘Correct,’ he said. And for the first time he grinned.

  ‘It sounds like Alan Macdonald,’ Thea Locke said with a laugh when Margot told her grandmother about the incident. She was kneeling before the fire drying her long hair after the rain. ‘I believe he’s Canadian, in Scotland in search of his roots.’ She smiled. ‘A pleasant man, so I’ve heard.

  ‘A male chauvinist,’ Margot muttered.

  Thea suppressed a smile. ‘Oh? What makes you say that?’

  Margot hesitated, looking up through her hair. ‘His manner.’

  ‘And the fact that he is, I believe, good looking and, dare I say it, sexy?’

  ‘Grandma!’ Margot looked up with a grin.

  ‘I may be old, but I have ears! And my memory’s good.’ The older woman smiled wryly. ‘I am so sorry for you children today. So possessive of your feminist honour that when a knight in shining armour jumps up and down in front of you, you turn your backs with a sniff. You need a man, my dear.’

  ‘I do not.’ Margot was furious.

  ‘But romance?’ Thea’s voice was gentle. ‘What do you do for romance?’

  ‘I don’t want romance! That is the point.’

  As if conscious suddenly of the incongruity of her long, gleaming auburn hair, she swept it up on the top of her head and began stabbing at the untidy, still-damp knot with large hairpins. ‘Is he on holiday here?’ she went on, offhandedly.

  Thea shrugged. ‘Does it matter, dear?’ she said.

  A week later Margot was back in London and behind a desk, her eyes riveted to the screen of her word processor.

  ‘How was Scotland?’ Paula, her colleague, sat back in her chair with a sigh. ‘I don’t know how you can bear to come back here after all those acres.’

  Margot grinned. ‘One and a half acres, to be exact! The rest belongs to the National Trust for Scotland and other worthy bodies.’

  On my land. Her own voice echoed in her head for a moment. What had possessed her to say it? He must have known. No wonder he had been so scornful. She punched at the keyboard indignantly. Why think of him? Who cares what he thought anyway? She certainly didn’t.

  He was waiting for her in reception. The soaked shirt was gone and he was wearing a tweed jacket. His hair, now that it was dry, was a sort of dark honey blond. But the eyes were the same. Pie
rcing, direct, quizzical. And very blue.

  ‘Miss Kinnaird?’ He stood up as she pushed through the swing doors near him.

  She froze.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t remember me?’ He held out his hand. ‘Alan Macdonald. We met in Scotland …’

  ‘I remember where we met, Mr Macdonald.’ She cut him short, trying to keep her voice coldly steady.

  He lowered his hand, unruffled, taking in her smart skirt and jacket with a swift glance and then he reached into his pocket. ‘I called on Mrs Locke last week, to find out how you were after the accident and when I told her I was coming to London, she asked me to give you this.’ There was an envelope in his hand.

  Margot looked down at it. ‘I’m sorry you were put to so much trouble,’ she murmured, suddenly at a disadvantage. ‘I’m sure she could have posted it just as well.’

  ‘She said not.’ She could see the open amusement in his eyes. ‘I don’t know if you have any plans, Miss Kinnaird, but I was hoping you might let me take you to lunch.’

  She could hardly refuse. If she did she would look ungrateful, even rude. ‘You must let me pay for myself …’

  ‘You can pay for me, too, if you like.’ That was not what she had meant at all, but before she could draw breath he had stepped forward and, taking her hand, closed her fingers around the envelope. ‘Come on. Take me somewhere nice and hugely expensive. I’m hungry.’ Ostentatiously, he held the heavy glass door for her, then followed her into the street. She hadn’t noticed the mischievous expression in his eyes.

  The restaurant was packed and the tables smaller than Margot had remembered. She was intensely conscious of the proximity of his legs beneath the cloth.

  ‘Did the horse recover?’ he asked.

  ‘She was fine, thank you,’ Margot replied stiffly.

  There was only the slightest trace of some transatlantic intonation in his voice, as he said to the waitress, ‘The entrecôte, I think, with broccoli, beans and potatoes. And soup to start. The lady will have the same.’

  Margot was silent for a full minute, trying to control her anger. By the time she was capable of speech the waitress had gone.