Though Diana exerted plenty of energy during each day – walking, foraging, cutting down the hazel whips that she liked to weave into ever more complex shapes – she slept very little at night. The hours of darkness were the most thrilling in the woods. The nocturnal birds and mammals gave it a vividness, depicting a three-dimensional nightscape that she could picture as clearly as if it were bathed in sunshine. She liked to lie in her bed and allow her mind to paint the detail that the noises described, and she was usually wide awake for the opening bars of the dawn chorus, certain she could sense the puffing of the first chest a moment before the inaugural note was sounded. Often, she’d compensate for her lack of sleep at night by dozing in the daytime and her favourite time for this was when it was raining heavily enough for the drops to penetrate the dense beech and conifer canopy, hitting the roof of the caravan hard and tapping out its rhythm that she’d then fall asleep to. She loved those hours, when it rained, when nobody used the footpaths and the animals had taken shelter all around her and she could burrow down just a few feet from other sleeping forms looking for the same comforts: a dry, secret bed and a sleep free from fear or conscience.
In the winter months, Diana spent a lot of time lying in the warmth of her bed, her blankets pulled up to her chin. Sometimes she would write her diary entries from there, leaving only her head and one hand exposed to the cold.
Echoing Sam’s own instinct for escape, Diana had moved to the woods in a resolute search for a simpler life and she’d made great strides in pursuit of this, although much to her surprise it transpired that a truly simple life was really quite demanding. Her daylight hours were almost all accounted for by the practical requirements of survival. Diana had imagined a life of quiet meditation, interrupted by occasional forays further afield with some sort of trug or other basket over her arm, so it had come as a bit of a surprise to find that even the most basic of needs took considerably more effort when you chose to live lightly. But, though she’d managed to find all sorts of clever ways to rid herself of the constraints of capitalism and dismiss any urge for the pursuit of the material, she still retained a few of her old habits. One of these in particular she found very hard to resist even though she knew that until she could stop this practice entirely, she could never be the free spirit she aspired to be.
This most destructive habit was her unhealthy obsession with her bête noire, Rebecca, who lived in the big house on the hill. (Diana was very fond of the description bête noire, it seemed to be so much more exotic than some of the other words she might reach for. Rebecca was also a thorn in her side, the bane of her life, a bugaboo, a rival, a foe. But bête noire was the most pleasing.)
Whilst Diana had moved to the caravan to escape Rebecca and all the people like Rebecca, she couldn’t quite stop herself from spending quite a lot of each day thinking about her. Diana could look at the clock on the wall and immediately have an instinct for what Rebecca might be doing at that very moment. Rebecca was Diana’s most visceral manifestation of the civilised world she’d left behind, and, drawing on the details of her own past-life, she could conjure up her image with ease. If Diana glanced at the clock at 7.30 a.m., she would imagine Rebecca with her head down, umbrella up, rushing for a train. Later, after a forage in the fields Diana would come back into the caravan to her notebooks and a sharply contrasting image of Rebecca would emerge. She’d have her head down, computer screen ablaze, pale green flashing against a dark green screen, those intoxicating numbers tripping over themselves in their bid to multiply like some resilient, toxic lifeform. Later as Diana ate her lunch, she liked to imagine Rebecca despondently stabbing at a piece of chicken with a plastic fork, fishing it out of its polystyrene container, the food barely observed by the torpid eyes of an automaton and barely tasted by the numbed taste buds of a perpetual dieter.
But what, for Diana, had begun as a guilty pleasure, occasionally indulged in to add contrast to her own feral existence, had become a compulsion. Diana could now lose a whole morning, perhaps even a day, just thinking about Rebecca. Lying on her bed and looking up at the blank white ceiling above her she could imagine Rebecca going about her day in highly defined, Technicolor detail. Focusing intently, Diana would not just see Rebecca getting on the train but could almost hear her clip-clopping along the station platform in her high heels, feel the wheezing puff of the train door opening and sense the brush of Rebecca’s knee-length skirt as she found her seat, before pulling it tightly across her knees as she crossed her legs and opened her laptop in one seamless movement. Sometimes Diana would feel like a fellow passenger, watching Rebecca as she tapped at her keyboard furiously, the commuter quite unaware of the arrivals and departures of her fellow passengers or their own stories unfolding around her. Rebecca would always insist on being the first to the office and the last to leave and Diana, satisfied by her own choices she’d made, revelled in the contrast of her quiet pace.
Then the sudden bark of a fox or the startling alarm call of the goshawk would tug her back to her small oblong world, unsure of quite why she’d strayed so far or how she’d managed to return.
Diana was not a witch, but she was a realist, and there were actually many areas that she failed to fully live the wholesome life she had promised herself. She knew she hadn’t been able to rid herself of everything, she hadn’t managed to achieve quite that, for here she was dozing in a caravan which in itself was inarguably ‘stuff’ but she’d gone to extraordinary lengths to overcome her obsession with personal wealth and here in the woods she lived very lightly. But she’d been less successful in ridding herself of the thought of Rebecca and the choices that woman had made, and Diana knew that obsessing about her was not too far removed from living that life herself and making those choices.
She scolded herself, out loud perhaps, though it was often difficult to discern between the words she spoke in her head and those she used to address the notebooks, pictures and other small comforts of her caravan. ‘We all choose our individual paths,’ she reminded herself. ‘I am not superior to Rebecca, she does what she has to do. I do what I have to do.’ But Diana did feel superior, she knew in her heart that eschewing that other way of living was a step further towards the enlightenment that she felt might reveal itself if she avoided the distraction of modern life.
Diana took a notebook from the shelf, turned the page and admired the opportunity its blankness presented her. She knew that her quest for nothingness would be a painstaking one, but here in the woods, at least she was no longer in a hurry. When she compared her new life to her past one, she could congratulate herself on the many giant strides she had taken. She’d coped with the reality of solitude here, and she reasoned that holding on to a few home comforts wasn’t such a great failing. If, after shedding her obsession with Rebecca, it still felt important to get rid of her last few material props, she would complete her purge then. For now, though, she had her owls, her goshawks, her foxes and her herbs to focus on, and perhaps, if she spent enough time in their company, Rebecca would begin to conveniently fade away into the past where she belonged.
Chapter 9
Sam knew nothing, yet, of Diana or their similarities, but she was already drawn to the path and the woods it led to. She was about to leave to explore it further when the phone rang. Sam sensed it would be her mother. Only her mother and the personal accident claim companies ever rang the landline, but her mother rang, uniquely, when Sam was least likely to want to talk to her whilst the personal accident claim companies weren’t as discerning.
‘Darling, how are you?’ her mother asked down the phone, purring her peerless blend of faux cheeriness and exaggerated concern.
‘I’m good, Mum. How are you?’ Sam replied, neutrally, whilst sinking down to the floor, her back against the wall.
‘Exhausted,’ she said with a heavy sigh. ‘Your father and I are off to the Dordogne.’
‘Lovely, have fun.’ Sam knew that her own contribution to this conversation was merely punctuation for her moth
er’s monologue and it could be a while before the underlying message would be revealed.
‘We’ll stop and see your cousins in Felixstowe. I expect we’ll have a bite to eat with them before the ferry. It will help break the journey and, these days, my tummy doesn’t agree with ferry food.’
‘Did your tummy ever agree with ferry food, Mum?’
‘Very true. But I’m even more sensitive these days. It will be lovely to see your cousin, Lucy is a super cook.’
‘Great. Send my love.’
‘They always ask after you. Gerry and Lucy. It would be rather nice if you went to see them one of these days rather than holing yourself up all the way over there. The children are growing up so fast. I worry you won’t ever know them and that feels like such a great sadness. They’re family, darling. And, you know what I feel about family. These early years are just so precious, but they do go so quickly. I just worry that you’re going to miss this opportunity to take part in their childhood and, whilst you might not see this now, you’ll almost certainly come to regret it.’
‘I can’t see myself popping to Felixstowe in a hurry.’ Sam felt herself tensing. She had very little interest in Gerry and Lucy or their children, and she doubted they had that much interest in her. She’d barely heard a mention of Gerry, or Lucy, or her cooking or their children until a couple of years ago and now her mother seemed to talk to her about nothing else.
‘Darling, you sound very brittle. Are you all right? It’s been such a long time since we’ve seen you. Your father and I do worry about you so.’
Sam propped the telephone receiver between her ear and her shoulder and examined her fingers while she spoke, running their tips across her nails, searching out rough edges for future examination. Her nails, she realised, were in a terrible state. She wondered, in the moments it took to form her response, whether this was because she had more important things with which to occupy herself or whether she had stopped caring about her appearance. ‘Well,’ she said, slowly, cautiously. ‘We’ve moved in to the new house. That’s kept me busy. It’s an upheaval, moving. And we’re new to the area so it has taken a while to settle in; there was so much to do, so we haven’t had much time at the weekends to stray very far. But you could always come and see us here, I’ve asked you over countless times. And we’re probably closer than the cousins. I doubt we’re much more than an hour from you on the motorway.’
‘But, darling, you’re in completely the wrong direction.’
Sam stopped looking at her nails and gripped the phone more tightly. ‘I’m in the wrong direction for what? It’s not completely in the wrong direction if you’re coming to see me. In my new house. With my husband.’
‘Oh, well, yes, I thought you meant on the way to the Dordogne.’ Sam could hear her mother’s deep inhalation before she spoke the next sentence. ‘Why don’t you come on holiday with your father and I? I think if you saw the cousins on the way that might break the ice.’
‘I don’t really need to go to the Dordogne to see the cousins, that’s ridiculous. And, regardless, I can’t just up sticks and go to France!’
‘Whyever not? You have no ties.’ Never had so much pitying judgement been squeezed into one tiny word.
‘But I do have ties. I have plenty of commitments. The garden for one.’
‘You have a garden now? Lovely, darling. I’m so pleased for you. That will take your mind off things. We have the lovely Mr Jones who does for us. Perhaps you can find somebody in the village to keep an eye on it. If you’re going to have a garden, you’ll need a Mr Jones, otherwise something that should be a pleasure can quickly become a burden.’
‘A tie, do you mean?’ asked Sam, quickly, smiling at her own riposte. ‘A Mr Jones? I don’t think so, it’s all new to me. I’m not ready to delegate yet. And besides I’m busy at work, too.’
‘You’re working? Oh,’ Sam’s mother paused dramatically before finishing the sentence with a hesitant, ‘good.’ Sam marvelled at her mother, the mistress of intonation. Never had the word ‘good’ been laden with so many syllables and so much disapproval.
‘Well, actually, I’m volunteering. At a hospice.’ As a younger woman, Sam hadn’t been a natural liar, but it was something she turned to more and more when confronted by other people’s disappointment in her. Even as she spoke the words, she could feel the heat rising into a fully formed blush. She mentally crossed her fingers behind her back by squeezing her eyes tightly shut. She had never stopped feeling like a small child when she spoke to her mother and she didn’t know why she had this compulsion to pretend she was better, more valuable, than her own truth. She was like a small child, she realised. A small child trying on different outfits in a hot changing room and coming out each time to a wrinkled nose or fierce shake of a head from a mother who had a very fixed idea of who and what she was expecting to emerge from the changing room each time.
Her mother, though, was indifferent to Sam’s fictional hospice work. ‘Good on you. And how is poor Danny?’
‘Poor Danny?’ asked Sam, her eyes that a moment before had been squeezed tightly shut now widened to their fullest possible stretch of incredulity even though her mother couldn’t see them.
‘Well, yes, life has been so beastly to him. Rotten.’
‘I’m not sure he sees it that way, Mum.’
‘No. Quite. I’m sure you’re more than enough, darling. I’ve got to go. Your father is calling for me.’
Sam said, ‘Bye, Mum,’ softly down the phone but wasn’t convinced her mother hadn’t already hung up. ‘Wow,’ she said, more forcibly to herself before standing up, replacing the phone in its cradle and stretching herself out.
Chapter 10
Giving the rage time to peter out, Sam paced up and down in the kitchen, thinking furiously. She had left London for the countryside looking for somewhere to hide. The recent intrusions, both from her neighbour and her mother, had infiltrated her defences.
The trouble with homes, she realised, is that they had too many entry points. There were doors to knock on, windows to peer through, telephone wires to creep down and a full electromagnetic spectrum of pulses and waves through which communication could reach her, regardless of whether or not she invited it in. She looked out of the window at her small neat lawn and its simplicity beckoned.
Leaving the house to fizzle and crack with unspoken sentiment, she headed into the garden. She inhaled and exhaled deeply through her nose, turning slow circles at first but then spinning around in the middle of the lawn and revelling in the fresh air that was now, inexhaustibly, hers. She still couldn’t quite believe she owned this plot. Not just the house, with its roof and its tiles and its walls and its bricks (so many bricks!) but the garage and the neatly laid path that led to the garden and the made-to-measure space for the wheelie bins and the sturdy fence and the lawn.
The lawn! That was perhaps the strangest of all realisations. The grass that grew each day, that would be cut and would grow again, was all hers. She owned this grass and all the future grass yet to be, and it seemed unfathomable to be in possession of something so mercurial. She owned the shadows too, she reasoned, particularly those cast by the trees to the east of her south-facing garden, as the sun fought its morning battle to hoist itself high above her. These shadows were hers alone to sit in, which, she decided, gave her some small right to the trees that cast them and with this astonishing revelation she left her garden, propelled by the urge to stretch her legs and further explore the intricate nervous system of public footpaths that intersected with her own small patch and should lead her to expand her domain in almost any direction without going near a road.
Sam could reflect on her scars that had never quite healed, and worry at them until they reopened but really, she realised, alone in her garden she had few responsibilities other than to touch the bark that shielded the trunk that led to the leaves that cast her very own shadows.
She joined the path she’d recently discovered and even as she closed the gate
behind her she felt a disproportionate thrill of anticipation at the knowledge that she would soon reach that house with its big lawn. She knew already that she would once again stop and spy on it and she knew, too, she wouldn’t be able to talk herself out of it. She also knew she’d want to go and look at that other house, too.
As she reached the high fence she slowed down, stopping at the knot hole she’d discovered before. Once again the gardener was hard at work but this time he was working much closer to her, just a few large paces from the boundary fence. She studied him carefully as he dug. With each spade-full he’d bend and sort through the earth, pulling out small roots and discarding these into a big low sack beside his barrow. He worked slowly and methodically but looked neither beatific nor anxious. His face was entirely neutral.
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