‘Where are we going?’ Danny called.
‘I have to check on Diana, the woman in the woods. I heard something fall, a tree maybe.’
‘You’re…’ He panted as he jogged to keep up with her fast stride. ‘You’re doing no such thing!’ His voice rose to a high pitch, but it failed to carry against the building noise of the storm. Another large crash exploded above them as Sam reached the gate and they both instinctively crouched down. Danny reached forward and pulled Sam’s hood tight over her face. ‘I’m coming with you.’
As they reached the path they slowed down. They were each armed with the torch from their phone only – usually so bright but now so dismally underwhelming. Each torch picked out just a small spot of wet ground in front of them.
‘This way,’ said Sam and she dived off left down the narrow path that led towards the caravan.
‘This is such a bad idea. We’re pretty much about to die,’ said Danny, desperate to lead but only capable of following closely behind Sam. He held his torch up high, shining the thin beam ahead of her, picking up the glistening leaves all around them.
Sam had slowed down and was now walking less confidently. She turned inwards to the thickest section of the wood and swiped her phone left and right, sending the narrow beam of light erratically from side to side, which returned only glimpses of leaves and brambles as she searched for her usual passageway into the briar. Turning her torch off she instructed Danny to do the same and waited for her eyes to adjust, hoping to see the glow of the caravan, a light or a lantern, any sort of beacon to draw her towards Diana. There was nothing. It was pitch black. Around them they could feel falling debris, as leaves and twigs hit the ground. Heavier branches swayed above their heads, threatening to follow suit. Sam switched her torch back on and walked on further, sweeping the light from side to side.
Her torchlight caught the bare stems of some thin hazel trees that swayed loosely in unison. Suddenly confident, Sam dived in between these boughs, pushing herself through a slim gap into the opening beyond. Danny caught a glimpse of her anorak shining in the rain as she was swallowed by the trees and he called to her just as she shouted out to Diana. Completely obscured before, the caravan was now easy to spot, its large frame solid and still amongst the dancing limbs.
‘Diana!’ Sam called loudly, competing with the shrieking wind.
‘Sam, this is way out of my comfort zone,’ called Danny behind her anxiously. Sam laughed, finding hilarity in the moment. Despite her urgency, the irony was not lost on her that she would choose this moment, with the wind raging around them and trees promising imminent collapse, to introduce Danny to the woods, to Diana and to the reality of witches.
Sam banged on the door and pulled it open, calling as she entered and using her torch to pick out the interior. The wind caught the door behind her, banging it loudly against the side of the caravan. The bed was unmade but empty and Diana was nowhere to be seen.
‘She’s not here.’
‘Good?’ said Danny, uncertain of why they were here.
‘Good, I guess, in that the caravan isn’t squashed under a fallen tree which is what I was expecting to see. But not good in that I have no idea where she is, and I hate the thought of her being out there tonight.’
‘Perhaps she’s moved somewhere safer than a forest in a thunderstorm?’ said Danny, hopefully, quickly following his concern up with a more selfishly motivated question, ‘Can we go? This place is giving me the creeps.’
‘Sure. Let’s go.’
Sam shut the caravan door behind her but didn’t speak all the way home. The rain continued to fall and the trees continued to hurl twigs and leaves at the bedraggled walkers but they made their way back steadily, picking their way carefully as they followed the path back to the warmth and safety of Broome Cottage. The storm was no longer directly above them, the thunder and lightning were now several seconds apart, but the wind was still screaming through the trees and closing the door of the cottage on the noise and the bluster brought silence crashing between them.
‘I’m worried sick about her.’
‘She’ll be fine. She’s a… she’s a…’ Danny wasn’t really sure what she was. ‘She’s an outdoor person, isn’t she?’ he tried helpfully. ‘She’s probably better equipped to deal with a storm than you or me. Certainly me. That was the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done.’
‘Really?’ Sam had taken her anorak off and was now drying her face with a towel. She looked at her husband who was still standing in his wet coat as if in shock. Drops of water were beginning to pool on the tiled floor around him.
‘Yes really. I spend my whole life mitigating risk. It’s what I do. What I don’t do is go into woods during gale-force winds. What I don’t do is enter strange caravans in the middle of the night. What I don’t do is chase witches around the countryside.’
‘Get your wet stuff off. I’ll chuck it in the dryer. And I’ll make us a hot drink before we go back to bed. And I don’t think it was a gale-force wind. And she’s not a witch.’ All of this was said over Sam’s shoulder as she disappeared into the kitchen, her wet socks leaving damp marks across the kitchen floor.
‘Still. It was risky.’
‘And you survived.’
‘Changes my risk profile though.’
‘It doesn’t change anything, does it?’
‘I’m now that person, the person that runs into a stormy wood despite the lightning, despite the thunder and with logs crashing all around us.’
‘I think it was just a twig or two.’
‘You were scared too. Don’t tell me you weren’t scared.’
‘I was scared. Am still scared. For Diana. Not for you or me.’
‘Anyway, I’m now officially an irrational person. I should pay more for life insurance.’
‘Well, I won’t tell them if you don’t.’
‘Deal.’ Danny smiled.
Sam poured boiling water into two cups and slid one towards Danny.
‘Thanks for coming with me.’
‘Pleasure. She’ll be fine. I’m sure she’s fine.’
‘Diana is fantastically sensible. I mean, living in the middle of a wood in a caravan doesn’t sound sensible, but she’s clever and wise. She knows what she’s doing. She must have known the storm was coming and she’ll have gone elsewhere. She has a friend who lives close by, I expect she’s gone there. But I just hope she got there OK.’
‘Well, of course that’s what she will have done.’
‘It’s just… Her bed was unmade. I’ve never seen the caravan anything other than immaculate. She definitely left in a hurry.’
‘How well do you know this woman?’
‘It’s hard to say. She’s difficult to know well, she’s ephemeral. I’ve been spending a bit of time with her recently. She’s the first person I’ve ever been able to talk to about anything.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Everything. Nothing. I’m probably doing more listening than talking but I’m finding the companionship a relief. The sound of another voice that’s not the voices in my head. I had no idea how much I needed someone.’
‘You’ve got me, Sam. Am I not enough for you?’ Danny sounded hurt.
‘No!’ Sam said, her voice higher than she meant. ‘We don’t talk, Danny, we stopped talking after my surgery. It’s like the doctors removed both our voice boxes when they removed my womb.’
Danny wanted to protest, but he couldn’t even find the words for that. He picked up their cups and took them to the sink to rinse. The storm was subsiding now but the noise of the wind in the trees had been replaced by the howling of unheard words in his ears. It was true. They didn’t talk. He took a deep breath before turning to face Sam.
‘Go and find her in the morning. I’ll take the morning off work and come and look with you if you’re really worried.’
‘You’d take the… No, sorry, I misheard you. I thought you said you’d take the morning off work. I must be tired
and emotional.’
‘Just because it hasn’t happened before…’
‘I’ll be fine. But, you know, Danny, I count on you to be you. Now you’re irrational, don’t start getting weird on me. There’s actuary-wizardry to be done tomorrow, it can’t all come to a crashing end because of a stormy night.’
‘That’s true. There are risk profiles to be modelled and outcomes to be ascertained.’
‘Spoken like a true actuary.’ Danny stepped towards Sam and pulled her into his arms. He kissed the top of her head.
‘I’m still the same, sensible guy but I know a bit more about me now.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes, I’d follow you to the ends of the earth, I’d be irrational for you. And risk profile be damned.’
Sam laughed. ‘That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said.’
Chapter 45
Sam left her garden and walked down the path. Debris from the storm littered the pathway and occasionally she stopped to move larger bits of wood to one side. The air smelt clean after the storm and the birds were singing loudly in celebration of another day. Sam walked past the turning to the caravan and carried quickly on, and she ignored the stile that would take her into the big field, too.
She rang on the doorbell of Willow’s Fortune as she had done before. She hoped Rebecca would open the door, or perhaps Diana, but once again the young housekeeper was there, standing silently and staring at her.
‘Is Rebecca in?’
‘No, she’s at work.’ The housekeeper waited, paused, more cautious now this neighbour knew her boss’s name.
‘Did she have a visitor last night? Diana? Is she here?’
‘No, she didn’t have a visitor. Is there something I can help you with?’
Sam gave her a half-smile, resigned to the fact that she was about to be turned away again. ‘May I come in and talk to you for a moment?’
The woman looked puzzled. ‘Talk to me?’
‘Do you mind?’
The woman shrugged and, much to Sam’s surprise, motioned for Sam to come in. Sam stepped into a large hallway with pale walls, a shining mahogany table and a richly coloured rug, Persian perhaps. She followed the young woman through to the vast kitchen. Each surface was empty and gleaming as if it had just been cleaned. It smelt of coffee.
‘I’m Sam,’ Sam said. ‘I live over there,’ she explained, pointing vaguely through the window and out beyond the big sweep of lawn. ‘I sometimes walk the path on the other side of your garden, so I thought I’d come and introduce myself.’
‘I’m Hope,’ said Hope, not offering Sam a seat. ‘You’ll have to make this quick. I should get back to work,’ continued Hope, gesturing to the immaculate kitchen around her.
‘I can see you’ve got a lot to get done,’ laughed Sam. ‘What time does Rebecca get home usually? I’d like to meet her, I’ve heard a lot about her.’
‘After me, but I clock off at six. I don’t live here. I never cross paths with her.’
Sam looked around for signs of life. No pictures, no personal trappings, no paperwork. None of the normal clues to personality. It didn’t really look like anyone lived there.
‘You missed quite a storm last night,’ said Sam.
Hope smiled politely but Sam knew she couldn’t stand in this kitchen making polite conversation for much longer.
‘And Rebecca definitely didn’t have a visitor last night?’
‘No. I would know if the spare room had been used.’ Hope looked crossly at Sam, worrying she was being asked to betray her employer.
‘It’s just…’ Sam hesitated. ‘A good friend of mine comes and stays here from time to time. I think she might have come last night. I thought I might catch her here. I was worried about her after the storm.’
‘Rebecca did not have a visitor last night. She is very busy, she travels a lot. She rarely stays here herself. I barely see her so I don’t think she’d have time for visitors.’ Hope sat down at the table heavily and looked up at Sam. Sam looked at her, puzzled, and pulled a chair out for herself. Sam recognised that look. Hope was longing to talk.
‘You must get a bit lonely here.’
‘It’s quiet yes, but it’s not too bad. It’s not the loneliness that gets me. It’s the futility of it all. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I have a job to do, to keep this house, but it is ludicrous. There’s nothing to do. When I got in this morning and saw that Rebecca had been I was actually excited to make the bed.’
Sam held her silence, letting Hope speak.
‘Most of the time she barely leaves a trace. I only know she’s been because she leaves a shopping list. She drinks a lot of coffee. She uses a lot of notebooks. She gets through an unbelievable amount of bedlinen considering she’s barely here. But that’s all I know about her. She’ll realise I don’t do much soon and fire me. I won’t even mind. I would fire me if I were her.’ Hope laughed.
Sam laughed too, but her eyes were sad and puzzled as she looked around the big cool kitchen, inhaling the scent of good Italian coffee which lingered, caught amongst the clean scent of talcum powder and the familiar scent of expensive perfume, painting a vivid picture of the person who lived there.
Chapter 46
Sam had bought a package of bacon from the butcher’s and it was now sizzling noisily on a heavy cast iron frying pan over a small fire in the clearing outside the caravan. Both Sam and Diana had been sitting quietly, taking it in turns, entirely spontaneously, to stoke the fire or turn the bacon as it spat busily in its own fat. As idyllic as the scene might have appeared to a passerby, the silence was neither satisfactory nor companionable. Eventually, as the bacon began to crisp and brown and the scent called out to them, Diana broke the impasse.
‘Diana’s not my real name.’
‘No, I figured that out myself. You’re Rebecca, aren’t you?’
Diana winced and looked sharply at Sam. ‘I was Rebecca. I became Diana when I came to the woods. I left Rebecca behind.’
As she spoke, Diana observed Sam’s face which remained passive. Her indifference gave Diana courage. ‘Though that’s not strictly true. Originally, when I first arrived here I had much grander ideas for my reinvention. For a while, I was to be Artemis. Artemis! Can you imagine?’ She laughed at herself before continuing.
‘I had a far-fetched notion that I may be able to begin my life over, wiping out everything that had happened before and starting with a rebirth of sorts. If I was to be reborn then I could take a new name. Not a disguise, you understand, but a whole new being. A new life.’ Diana smiled at the memory, mocking herself with an empty laugh. ‘I called myself Artemis for a number of days, but it didn’t stick. I admired Artemis. I wanted to be Artemis – but her responsibilities were simply too great for me.’
Sam had sliced a white loaf and was now toasting the bread piece by piece on some hot embers she’d scraped towards her for the purpose. ‘Funny. I always thought Artemis was a boy. Not that it matters of course. If you’re going for a whole new life you can start again in any guise, I suppose.’
‘That’s true, of course, but choosing to be a man would have been an admission of defeat. It is so much harder to be a woman, don’t you think? And having failed so spectacularly once, I felt I owed it to myself to try again. Regardless, Artemis was a girl. In mythology she was the Mistress of the Animals. I think I could have borne those duties reasonably well, but Artemis was a bit more of a polymath than me, an all-rounder. If you want my opinion, her remit was probably a bit too broad. But perhaps in a steep hierarchical order the top tier will always assume they are the only ones capable of vast responsibility, and there’s no greater example of hierarchy than God’s. “You, you and you, you can be my disciples.” Which means you follow me and do as I do. Not exactly egalitarian, is it…?’ Diana drifted off and looked at the bacon and then Sam with equal intensity.
‘Where was I?’
‘Artemis I think…’ Sam said, hesitantly, though in truth, Sam was struggli
ng to follow Diana whose eyes had been darting all around her as if the answers were leading her to them without needing to voice the questions.
‘Artemis indeed. When I first came here I was a bit like her. I thought I might be able to do it all, reign supreme in my own little kingdom, but even within this small realm I quickly realised I needed to specialise.’
‘What else was she goddess of, this Artemis? I bet there’s nothing much that she could do that you couldn’t do, if you put your mind to it.’ Sam looked around her, at the little glade they were cooking in, the bucolic haven Diana had built out of nothing more than a messy head and a need to abscond.
‘Technically I probably shared a few of her skills, but I found her multifarious roles to be just a bit contradictory. She was goddess of animals, yes, but also the hunt – and that feels like a conflict of interest. I’m not averse to bagging myself a rabbit for the pot, but a hunt always feels so merciless, the odds seem stacked against the hunted. And on top of that, she was both goddess of childbirth and virginity which again seems incompatible. Childbirth and virginity? If you’re looking after one, then you took your eye of the ball on the other. Bit like modern day politicians as far as I can see. An opinion on everything but a comprehension of nothing.’
Sam moved the bacon to the edge of the pan, to let it complete its cooking a bit more slowly. She leant back in her chair, allowing it to tip back fully until she was leaning against the beech tree behind her so that she could look up at the furthest leaves and their backdrop of grey sky. It was about to rain.
‘Perhaps life was simpler then? Perhaps a goddess could preside over her domain and see the purpose of all of it, accepting all of those individual components without passing judgement. Virginity probably needed a goddess to a point and then, you know. Not so much. It’s hardly a full-time job. And besides, you’d be an excellent goddess of childbirth. So would I. Better not to know too much probably. Goddess speaking, not practically speaking.’
Growing Season Page 24