Too Near the Dead

by Helen Grant

  Forget it, I tell myself. Forget it.

  One thing I do ask him, though. Later, when we are lying side by side in the darkness, I say, “James?”

  “Yes?” he says sleepily.

  “When you were coming up the drive tonight, did you see anyone – I mean, anything – over by the trees on the right?” I hesitate. “Maybe a deer or something? I thought I saw something over there as you drove up.”

  He takes such a long time to reply that I think he has already fallen asleep. Then he says, “No, I didn’t see anything,” in a voice that is slurred with tiredness. I wait for a long time, but he doesn’t say anything else, and at last sleep claims me too. I sleep through the night, and if there are any dreams, I don’t remember them.

  Chapter Six

  “You’ll go mad, Fen,” is the first thing Belle says as she gets out of her car, pushing her magenta hair back from her face so she can look at me properly. She has lipstick to match the hair, and I see that she is wearing boots that are completely impractical for the country.

  “Thanks, Belle,” I say ironically.

  “Seriously,” she says, her grey eyes round. “This is the middle of nowhere. This isn’t even the arse of beyond, it’s...” She tries to think of a suitable simile. “...the appendix of beyond, or something. Do you have any idea how far away from civilisation this place is?”

  By civilisation I’m not sure whether she means Edinburgh, or London.

  “It’s only twenty miles from Perth,” I protest. “About twenty miles,” I add lamely.

  Belle isn’t listening. “I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “I turned off the motorway onto this dual carriageaway, and then I turned off again onto this little A road, and I thought, well, I must get to something soon, a services with a Costa or something, but – not a thing. And then,” she goes on, “I had to turn onto a little B road, and you know, it was getting like a horror film or something – smaller and smaller roads until you get stuck and you can’t turn round. As for that last bit, I think I left my back axle in it.”

  She reaches into the car. “This is for you. I think you probably need it.”

  “Wow,” I say. “I’ve never seen a bottle of gin that big before.”

  “I hope you’ve got tonic,” Belle says severely.

  “Loads,” I say, truthfully.

  “Good.” She hands me the gin, then tilts her head back. “So this is Barr Dub House, is it?”

  “Barr Dubh,” I say. “It means ‘black hill’.”

  She raises her eyebrows. “It’s certainly impressive, I’ll give you that.”

  “Thank you–”

  “–But it’s still miles from anywhere.”

  “It’s only a couple of miles to the town,” I point out.

  “But is it near enough to walk back when you’ve had a few?”

  “Not really,” I admit. “No.”

  Belle sniffs. “I suppose James wants you all to himself. Like Bluebeard.” Suddenly she smiles broadly. “Oh, hello James.”

  James is at my elbow, looking as improbably gorgeous as I’ve ever seen him, but as grim as an undertaker. Clearly he has just heard himself being compared to Bluebeard. Then his face breaks into a grin and I realise he was doing it on purpose.

  “Hello, Belle,” he says easily. “Welcome to Barr Dubh House.”

  Belle has brought an incredible quantity of luggage, considering that she is only staying for the weekend. James offers to carry it into the house, but when he opens the car boot and looks inside, he announces very gravely that this may take some time.

  Belle takes my arm very firmly. “You can show me over the house,” she says. So I do.

  There is still a faint smell of emulsion, and our footsteps echo crisply as we walk around, weaving our way around removers’ cartons. All the same, it’s fun to tour the house, and I don’t feel too bad about showing off, because I know Belle thinks we live lamentably far away from the bright lights. But then Belle is utterly a city girl; to her, anything with sheep in it is a kind of dystopian badlands. For me, London had begun to feel like a trap.

  I show her the charcoal grey kitchen with its stainless steel range and the fridge freezer that is tall enough to be a pharaonic sarcophagus. We wander through the dining room where a huge gilt-edged mirror is standing against the wall, waiting to be hung. It reflects an ivory-coloured wall halfway across which a tide of dark bottle green has swept and then suddenly been arrested – yet another work in progress. Then I take Belle into the living room, where she looks at the enormous window and says, “Wow.” While she is gazing out at the view, I stand next to her and look at the spot on the treeline where I saw the person in lavender. Of course, there is nobody there today. You wouldn’t expect a local walker to be in exactly the same place every time you looked out. After that, we put our heads around the door of James’s study.

  A little later I take Belle upstairs and show her the bedrooms, including the one I’ve prepared for her. It’s the pink one, the last of the repulsive mustard colour having been painted over in a hurry. It’s at the other end of the corridor from ours, and it has its own ensuite.

  “Shame,” says Belle, when she sees that. “I quite fancied a dip in that bath with the feet.”

  “You can anyway,” I tell her, but she’s already drifted away, towards the window. From this side of the house you can see the drive with its line of trees, and beyond the fields, a wooded hill. There’s a fitful sunshine today, brightening the landscape for twenty minutes at a time before lapsing into brooding cloudiness again. In spite of the capricious weather, the view is undeniably beautiful. Sometimes I see birds of prey hovering in the air currents over that hill.

  “It is amazing here,” says Belle, without turning around. “You’re very lucky, Fen.”

  I wait for her to follow this up with, but you’re still miles from anywhere or but you’ll still go nuts out here, but she doesn’t. I’m glad about that, because it’s true, and it doesn’t need any qualification. It is amazing here, and I am very, very lucky. I wouldn’t want anyone to think otherwise.

  We spend what’s left of the afternoon sitting at the back of the house, in a corner that’s sheltered from the breeze but traps the autumn sunshine. James brings us drinks – coffee for Belle, tea for me, and later a glass of wine each – but otherwise he leaves us to it. He knows we are going to talk for hours about people he doesn’t know, and besides, he wants to get back to the book he is working on. I can tell that from the slightly preoccupied air he has; his body may be wandering about Barr Dubh House, but his imagination is somewhere else altogether. Weekends as a concept are meaningless to him. So we wave him away and let him get on with it, although Belle takes care to get the bottle of wine from him first.

  Although Belle has never worked at the same office I did, she knows a lot of people who do, mainly because she has been on-off dating one of them.

  “Genghis Caan is spitting feathers,” she tells me. “You know the bloke who wrote that thriller you were always moaning about? He’s written another one, and it’s even worse. I don’t know why anyone keeps publishing them. Maybe he’s sleeping with someone important.” She rolls her eyes. “Anyway, she’s supposed to be copyediting it, and she’s not happy about it. Take care you don’t end up with it, Fen.”

  “I can always turn it down,” I point out. “I’m freelance now.”

  “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Belle upends her glass, and holds it out for a refill.

  “I’m my own boss now,” I tell her. “And believe me, I’m not touching that thriller. I’d rather copyedit a telephone directory.”

  “Good,” says Belle firmly. She picks up the wine bottle and shakes it gently. “This one’s empty. Is there any more of that? It was rather nice.”

  I fetch another one and we sit there talking an increasing amount of nonsense until the d
ay begins to slide into twilight and the midges become troublesome. Then we go indoors, to find James making dinner – some kind of stir fry, which he is shaking about with cheerful vigour. He is actually humming to himself. I deduce from this that the writing has been going well.

  “Sit,” he says, nodding at the breakfast bar which we have mostly been using for meals, until such time as the dining room shall be entirely and not just partially green.

  “House-trained too,” remarks Belle, as she slides onto one of the stools.

  It is very late by the time we decide to call it a night. I drink a huge glass of tap water before I go upstairs, in the hopes of fending off a headache in the morning. I’m faintly annoyed with myself; I never normally drink this much. Perhaps I really am terrible at saying no, I say to myself. I fill the glass again and carry it upstairs with me, doing my best not to slop it everywhere.

  I creep into the dark room, trying not to wake James. The curtains are open a little way, casting a bar of cool moonlight across the room and the bed. I go over and set the glass of water down on the windowsill. On impulse, I lean close to the window, staring out into the night. The moon is full and very bright tonight. Beyond the fence the pasture is pale and silvery and bisected by a thin dark stripe that runs from the distant trees to the edge of what will eventually be our garden: a rabbit track, I suppose, invisible by the strong light of day but revealed by the shadowy contrasts of night. I stare at it for a while. Nothing moves out there.

  At last I undress and slide into bed. I lie there thinking that I should have closed the curtains properly, that the moonlight will keep me awake, and while I am thinking about that, sleep claims me.

  Chapter Seven

  When Belle comes down very late the next morning, James is making us an enormous fried breakfast, including slices of lorne sausage and potato scones. A lot of melted butter seems to be involved.

  Belle looks at it, and says, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” She turns her back on us as she pours herself a large black coffee, but then she says, “It’s no use, I can still smell it,” and holds out her hand for a plate.

  I’m already spearing fried mushrooms with a fork. “James,” I say between mouthfuls, “I love you.”

  “So do I,” says Belle.

  After breakfast we roll up our sleeves and paint the rest of the dining room green. This was Belle’s idea; she says she wants to be useful, although I think she’s already being useful just by being here. I’d forgotten how nice it is just to see a different face and indulge in a bit of scurrilous gossip.

  That thought brings me back to the encounter with Seonaid again. I haven’t mentioned it to James, because I didn’t want the first report I made of the town to be something negative. So eventually I tell Belle about it instead – about lavender being unlucky here.

  She listens to me patiently, and then she says, “Bollocks. I bet you anything she made that up.”

  “I did wonder,” I tell her. “But why would she do that?”

  “She probably has a job lot of nasty white satin, and no lavender fabric in the shop,” says Belle.

  I snort with laughter. “It can’t have been that.”

  “I bet it was,” says Belle robustly. “Unlucky, my arse.”

  “Well,” I say, “I’ve kind of gone off the idea of lavender anyway.”

  “What are you having instead?”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking maybe blue.”

  “Well,” says Belle, “Sod what anyone else thinks. Just have whatever you want. Except maybe beige.”

  “I was thinking of keeping beige for the bridesmaid’s dress,” I say, straight-faced, and enjoy about two seconds of seeing the horror on Belle’s face before I can’t help grinning.

  We carry on that like for much of the day, painting and bantering with each other, until all four walls are dark green and we also have flecks of dark green on our hands and our clothes. I’m for stopping after that, but Belle has her usual relentless energy; she starts opening boxes with “dining room” scrawled on them in black marker, and unpacking the contents. Of course the flat in London had no dining room; it had a tiny table shoved up against a wall. The boxes are from somewhere else, somewhere that is still packed up in a corner of my mind with do not open marked on top. Up until now I’ve put off looking inside. Belle, however, is fearless. She rips the tape off the boxes with the grim determination of someone ripping a sticking plaster off a wound. She unpacks a silver candelabra, a set of crystal wine glasses, and an entire gilt-edged dinner service.

  All of these things require decisions, but I’m not ready to make them, so I put them in the sideboard.

  It’s a new one, big enough to swallow everything except the candelabra. Out of sight, out of mind.

  “What’s this?” says Belle as she opens the third carton. “It’s kind of weird if it’s a table decoration.”

  Reluctantly, I go over and take a look. I recognise all the other stuff, right down to the tarnished silver teaspoons, but I don’t recall ever seeing this before. It’s an arrangement of artificial flowers, made of what appears to be white porcelain. It looks vaguely bridal because of the colour, but I can’t imagine how it would be used, as it is too big for anything but the most extravagant wedding cake. The thing is a small mystery within the wider mystery of other people’s tastes and choices and perspectives, even those who should be closest to us. I touch one of the snowy petals with a finger; it is smooth and very cool and I cannot bring myself to like it. Flowers should be real or not at all. I don’t even really like hothouse flowers, grown for sale, because there is something artificial about them. When I marry, I decide, I shall have wild flowers. I’m tempted to tell Belle to bin these china blooms, but in the end I bottle out.

  “In the sideboard,” I say, and she slots them in on top of a silver plated tray.

  It’s my turn to cook this evening, but I can’t be bothered after spending the day painting and sorting, so Belle and I drive into the town for fish and chips. The three of us eat at the dining room table in spite of the fresh paint smell, just so that we can admire the green walls. We even have a bottle of Prosecco to go with the food, but none of us overdoes it.

  The sun is going down by now, so I light some candles, creating an incongruously gracious effect in contrast with the fish and chips boxes littering the dining table. I don’t talk very much this evening.

  I lick salty chip grease off my fingers and sip Prosecco and watch the other two. I don’t need to listen to the words to follow the flow of the conversation. James talks with energy and enthusiasm, and he argues well, but sometimes he is prone to letting his writer’s imagination run away with him, and then Belle demolishes him with savage glee. There is an edge to these skirmishes, but I can tell that James likes Belle because she doesn’t let him get away with anything, and Belle likes James because he still believes in things; he hasn’t become as cynical as some of our acquaintances. The candlelight gilds their faces and when the discussion becomes more heated they draw shapes in the air with their hands.

  I watch them and I think: I love these people. These are my real family – my oldest friend and the man I’m going to marry.

  It’s such a simple thing – to belong to certain people, and have them belong to you – and yet so many people take it for granted. Not me, though; I will never take it for granted, and I will never let anything spoil this.

  Chapter Eight

  On Sunday morning, Belle is late downstairs again. James eventually goes off to his study; he is itching to get on with the new book. I stay in the kitchen, drinking tea and looking out at the fields and the distant trees. The land is so lush and green now, but soon the leaves will be turning the colour of flames; the days will be colder and the nights longer. I wonder how it will be here at Barr Dubh House in the middle of winter.

  At last I hear footsteps on the stairs. When Belle comes in,
it seems to me that she is missing a little of her usual bounce. She looks tired, and when she smiles I have the feeling that it’s an effort. Her grey eyes meet mine for a second, then her gaze slides away.

  “Coffee?” I say.

  “God, yes,” says Belle. She slides onto a bar stool and sits there rubbing her face with her hands.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I just... didn’t sleep very well.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Dr. Munro prescribes carbs.”

  Belle doesn’t argue, so I cut a couple of doorstop slices of bread and stick them in the toaster. I set out butter and go off hunting for a jar of marmalade that I’ve put in one of the many new kitchen cupboards, if only I could remember which one. While I’m opening and closing doors, Belle says nothing at all. Then I look up and catch her watching me, with a peculiar expression on her face.

  I stand there with the jar of marmalade in my hands and say, “Are you sure you’re okay, Belle?”

  There’s just a tiny pause before she says, “Yeah, I’m fine. I just need more coffee.”

  So I pour her another cup and make myself a mug of tea, and then I slide onto the stool opposite her.

  “What do you want to do today? We could go out somewhere.”

  “I’m not going for a walk, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Belle says firmly. “I’ve already seen three fields, one hill and eleven sheep from my bedroom window. That’s quite enough.”

  In the end we settle on a drive into the town to look for an armchair for the spare bedroom, followed by lunch at the sprawling Victorian hotel. Lunch is enormous and very hearty – big slabs of roast meat and potatoes and heaps of vegetables liberally glazed with butter – and also very lively. There is a buzz of voices around us all the time – clearly the hotel is a very popular place for Sunday lunch. In this cheerful atmosphere, Belle begins to look a bit less wan.