The Blurred Lands

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  "Right", said Helen, all business now. Yes, he'd definitely imagined it. "First things first. What was the name of that firm of solicitors?" She picked up her phone.

  "Stinder Hackleworth," he said, "but don't bother searching for them. They're not online."

  "I have a better idea," said Helen, holding the phone to her ear. "Fiona, this is the love of your life. I'm so distraught by your absence I've taken a man out for coffee. Oh, no one you'd know. Oh, all right, it is John, smart arse. Ever heard of the solicitors Stinder Hackleworth? Oh, yeah, okay, I'll wait." Helen held the phone a few inches away from her ear. "She's asking the senior partner. He's two hundred years old, and he knows everyone. If he hasn't heard of them, they—hello? Right. Thank you. I'll see you later. I'll—what? Oh. Yes, I suppose that might go some way to making up for your absence today. Bye, love."

  Helen looked John in the eye. "No such solicitor. Still got that letter?"

  John reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the document. For a horrible moment, he thought it would have a different name on it, but there it was in ornate script at the top.

  "Great," said Helen, then went back to her phone. "I'll call an Uber."

  Eleven

  The rain fell with a listless persistence that made Noone House look cold and uninviting. Its tiny windows stared out like the multiple eyes of a spider, each pupil dark and dead.

  "Come on," said John, quickening his pace as he crossed the bird-shit border. As he got to the bottom of the steps, he stopped, looking up in puzzlement.

  "What is it? This is the place, right?" Helen climbed the steps and stood at the black door.

  "The plaques," said John.

  "What plaques?"

  "Exactly." He examined the space where the brass plaques had listed the companies with offices in Noone House. "There was a map-making firm and a bookbinder. Then Stinder Hackleworth. The top floor was..."

  He pictured himself standing there the day before. "It was unoccupied, I think, but there was something weird about it."

  John leaned forward and looked at the brickwork. There was no evidence of any holes where the plaques had been screwed in. Maybe they had been glued in place. The bricks were old and sooty.

  "I don't understand," he said.

  Helen moved to stand alongside him. "What did you say this place was called?"

  "Noone House. Why?"

  She didn't reply, so he straightened up and looked at her. She was pointing at the wooden sign. That, at least, was the same as John remembered. White-painted wood with black letters. But it didn't say Noone House. It said E Cattridge, Antiquarian Books.

  As John shook his head in bemusement, the door opened, and a face peered out at them.

  "We only open to the public every other Wednesday, except in the winter when it's Monday afternoons. If we're preparing for a book fair, it's the third Friday in the month."

  The voice was high pitched and grating. A small face looked up at them, beneath a rigid mass of hair.

  It was the beehive.

  "Hello," he said. "I was here yesterday. I saw Mr Hackleworth."

  "Not yesterday," she shrieked. "Closed all day. No Mr Battleworth here."

  "Hackleworth," said John. "The solicitors upstairs. Stinder Hackleworth."

  "No one upstairs," said the beehive.

  Helen put a hand on John's elbow and squeezed before he could speak.

  "Have you been here long?" she asked.

  "Thirty-two seconds," came the prompt reply.

  "Um, I mean,"—she looked back at the sign—"E Cattridge. The bookseller. Is that you?"

  "Eric Cattridge was my grandfather. Father's name was Ernest."

  "Eric and Ernie?" said Helen.

  "No, Eric and Ernest," said the beehive.

  "Oh. And you are?"

  "Ermintrude Cattridge. Three generations of rare book sellers."

  "Do you specialise in particular books?" asked John, looking at the woman directly, trying to elicit some sign she knew who he was.

  "Yes," she said, staring back at him. There was no hint of recognition in her eyes.

  "Mrs Cattridge," said Helen.

  "Miss," the beehive corrected with a shriek.

  "Miss Cattridge. My friend John visited a building yesterday, very close to here. He's convinced this is it. Could we take a quick look to set his mind at rest?"

  Since the beehive was pretending not to know him, John expected her to refuse and slam the door in their faces. Instead, she took a step backwards.

  "Follow me."

  Helen raised her eyebrows at John and stepped over the threshold.

  The lobby of the building shared the same dimensions but almost every detail was different. There was no desk, no ledger. The floor wasn't tiled, it was carpeted in a faded gold and red pattern. The walls were papered with a striped pattern familiar to anyone who had stayed in a hotel in the nineteen-sixties. The curved bannister still followed the staircase to the upper floors, but it was a light polished pine, not the dark wood John remembered.

  The four doors leading off to other rooms were the same. They were all shut apart from the first on the left - the one from which the strangely arousing music had emerged. John could see most of the room. It was lined with books. They were all hardbacks, their titles indecipherable. The beehive glided across the carpet with surprising speed and closed the door.

  "Alternate Wednesdays only."

  Helen pointed upstairs. "May we have a look?"

  "No one upstairs."

  "Please?"

  The beehive looked at her watch and folded her arms. "Be quick."

  "Come on," whispered Helen, taking John's arm, "before she changes her mind."

  The grandfather clock ticked on the second floor.

  "That's the same," said John. His confidence returning, he led the way up to the third floor and the dead yucca plant. Without knocking, he pushed the door open.

  The room was empty. Not only that, the bare floorboards were covered in a layer of dust broken up only by an occasional mouse or rat turd.

  John walked through the room, coughing as his shoes flicked up small clouds of dust. It was empty. The window let in enough light to illuminate hundreds of cobwebs on the ceiling, and a cursory glance was enough to prove there was no drawer in the far wall. There was one major difference between the room he was standing in now and the room in which he'd first met the beehive and Tobias Hackleworth. It was double the size. Yesterday, three strides in any direction would have brought John to a wall or the door. This room was twenty feet from door to window and fifteen feet across.

  He turned to Helen.

  "I want to go now," he said.

  Helen took him to the nearest pub. It was dark and warm inside, with booths along one wall. Narrow steps led down to a small table with two church pews as seats. That was where Helen steered John after she'd bought him a pint of stout with a large whisky as a chaser.

  "Consider this a prescription," she said, as she put the glasses in front of him. "Drink. You'll feel better."

  John did as he was told. Remarkably, despite the fact he was doubting his own sanity, Helen was right. Within five minutes, he felt better.

  Helen sipped a gin and tonic. "I have a few questions," she said. "Answer honestly and quickly. Don't think too hard about it. You game?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. Let's start with the letter. Ashleigh, right?"

  "Ash. Yes."

  "You said you had a sexual relationship the summer after you finished university. Did you love her?"

  John hesitated. Helen growled like an animal. John looked at her in shock, but she continued as if nothing had happened. "No hesitations. I told you not to think about it. Did you love her?"

  "No."

  "Infatuated with her?"

  "Yes."

  "To what extent?"

  "To the extent that it became dangerous."

  "How dangerous?"

  "I had a breakdown afterwards. Spent some time
in an institution."

  "What condition were you suffering from?"

  John paused again. It wasn't something he liked to talk about. Helen's nails scratched along the table top. He didn't remember her nails being so long.

  "Psychosis brought on by stress. It was temporary. The depression lasted longer."

  "Any episodes since requiring hospitalisation?"

  "No, none."

  "Not even minor episodes?"

  "No."

  "Good. Are you still mourning Sarah?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you receive the letter from the solicitor before or after your performance at the Charleston?"

  "After."

  "Did you start thinking about Ash when you received it?"

  "Yes."

  "About the sex - and your feelings for her?"

  "I suppose so, yes."

  "It was the day after the anniversary of Sarah's death. Did these thoughts about Ash make you feel guilty?"

  "A little. I put them out of my mind."

  "Hmm."

  Helen sat back and closed her eyes. John thought about saying something, but she immediately held up a finger to stop him.

  "Did Ash ever take you anywhere other than the cottage?"

  "We walked in the woods once."

  "Did you have sex then?

  "I don't see what that has to do—"

  Helen hissed between her teeth. It was such an odd, unexpected reaction, that John, who had been staring into his pint, looked up in surprise. For a moment her features looked like they belonged to someone else, but a second later, her face was calm, her eyes still closed. She opened them as he was looking and smiled.

  "Nearly done. What are you planning to do with the cottage?"

  "Sell it."

  "Are you going over there?"

  "No. I can handle everything from here. I forgot about Ash for thirty years, I don't want to dredge it all up now."

  "I understand, John. You want my professional opinion, right?"

  "Yes. Or you can refer me to a specialist, I suppose."

  "No need."

  John looked at her.

  "You trust me. That's why you came to me."

  "Yes, I trust you."

  "You did the right thing. I almost went into psychiatry rather than general practise. I still keep up with all the latest research. What you're describing is a textbook example of an aftershock."

  "A what?"

  "A severe episode of mental illness is like an earthquake. You can experience aftershocks months, years, even decades later. Your dream occurred three years to the day after the worst experience of your life. It's clearly triggered a mild relapse of the psychosis. The letter has made it worse."

  "Oh." John wasn't sure what to say. The word psychosis wasn't something he'd ever wanted to hear again, even when modified by the word mild. He remembered the Bristol hospital, his mother asleep in the chair next to his bed. Terrified she was losing him. He couldn't reassure her. He was terrified he was losing himself.

  "Will it pass?" he managed, after a few deliberately slow swallows of beer. "How worried should I be?"

  "There's no need to worry at all if you're willing to take my advice. It'll take a few weeks to turn things around, I expect, then you'll be right as rain. But I'm not sure you're going to like it."

  John took his time answering. His throat was tight and his head hurt. The idea of another breakdown terrified him. The loss of control, the helplessness, the peculiar horror of being institutionalised.

  "Look, Helen, if you can help me, I'll do whatever you say."

  He drained the rest of his beer and put both his hands palm-down on the table. "What do I need to do?"

  "CBT," said Helen, pushing his whisky towards him. "Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Over a ninety-five percent success rate in curing the kind of condition you're suffering from. Drink up."

  "I've heard of CBT. If you're scared of spiders, you have to handle them. If you're scared of the dark, you spend a few minutes every day in a dark room. Wait. What do you expect me to do? Ash is dead."

  "CBT means facing your fear head-on. In this case, although you ended the relationship with Ash, she—or, rather, your idea of her—still has a hold over you. She's a ghost in the machine, messing with your mind decades after your relationship. You need to exorcise her."

  There was a gleam in Helen's eyes, an unfamiliar twist to her lips. John had never seen her so serious.

  "How?" he asked.

  "Stay in that cottage. Your decision to sell the property without even visiting it shows how strongly you associate it with your psychosis. Go there, break its hold over you, break her hold over you."

  John drank the whisky. He remembered following Ash along the path to the cottage that first night, knowing what was about to happen, his heart clenched tight with something as close to fear as it was desire. He should have trusted that instinct.

  "Can't you just prescribe Prozac?"

  Helen looked him in the eye. "Is that what you want? It's up to you. I've given you an informed opinion, which you are free to ignore, despite the serious risk in doing so. It has to be your decision, John. I can't make it for you. What are you going to do?"

  The subtle lighting in the pub darkened as if someone had twisted a dimmer switch. John was aware of a movement behind Helen. Behind the bar was a mirror and, reflected in it, the giant from the Bloomsbury Suite looked back at him, his tangled hair scraping the ceiling, a pint of beer looking like a shot glass in his gnarled fist. John blinked and looked away from the mirror to where the giant was standing. There was no one there.

  Helen, seeing his face, looked over her shoulder, then back, her eyes fixed on his as she waited for his answer. The air itself seemed tight, a balloon skin stretched thin to the point just before it burst.

  John made his decision. In the end, it boiled down to the fact that he was scared and angry. Scared of what memories might surface at the cottage, and angry at the fragility of his own mind. He wasn't twenty anymore, callow and untested. He'd seen a child brought into the world, lost his mother to dementia, and had to stand by while cancer inexorably chewed his wife's life away from the inside out. He would not be intimidated by the ghost of a woman who should have just been a fling.

  "You're right," he said. "I'll go."

  The clink of glasses resumed, and someone laughed at the bar.

  "Good decision," said Helen. When she picked up her glass, he noticed her hand was shaking.

  Twelve

  John arrived at the cottage exactly a week after receiving the letter. A call to his manager cancelling his gigs for a month, a message on Bonneville's answerphone to let Augustus know where he was. As far as Harry was concerned, it was a short holiday near Bristol. He didn't tell his son he owned the cottage. John had never spoken of his stay in hospital, and as uninhibited sex sessions with a girl he'd known before Harry's mother had never been a topic of family discussion, he felt no need to mention it now.

  Mid-afternoon, he picked up the keys from the estate agent, who handed over a heavy piece of ironmongery from a cabinet full of modern keys.

  A fifteen-minute drive and he was parking in the layby on the edge of Leigh Woods. Back in the eighties it had been a muddy verge, but since then, it had been widened and covered in gravel, with space for three cars. A public footpath followed the periphery of the field opposite, and the flies around the bin next to the gate suggested it was popular with dog walkers.

  John opened the boot and pulled out a heavy canvas bag and a rucksack. He'd brought enough clothes for a week, some old sheets, paint pots and brushes. If he was going to confront his demons, he'd get some decorating done at the same time. The last bag contained a kettle and enough provisions for the first night.

  He walked along the road from the end of the layby towards the big oak on the corner.

  The footpath past the oak was as overgrown as it had been thirty years ago. It was nothing like as well-used as the one favoured by the dog wa
lkers, but the odd cigarette butt and some discarded beer cans marked the edges as it led into the woods. Twenty yards in, and the path turned to the left. Straight ahead, a high iron gate, rusting and blackened with age, blocked John's progress. A metal postbox on a wooden stake had been hand-painted with flaking letters: Sally Cottage.

  John put his hand on the gate, twisted the iron ring to lift the bar out of the latch, and pushed. It swung open. He didn't move for a moment, just stared ahead.

  Built of stone in the mid-nineteenth century on the site of an earlier, simpler dwelling, Sally Cottage was like a child's drawing in its dimensions. It was north facing, made of grey stone, with a slate roof and a single chimney rising above the east end. The four small symmetrical windows, those on the ground floor on either side of the door, the others above them, had wooden shutters in a style common on the continent, but unusual in Britain.

  John stepped up to the door and fought with the key in the lock before it opened with a deep clunk.

  Thirty years earlier, the living room had been carpeted, but it had since been stripped back to uneven, dirty floorboards. On the right was a big stone fireplace, blackened with the scars of a million flames. An old, sagging sofa faced the fire. Great chunks of plaster were missing from the ceiling, and long cracks radiated from the solitary light fitting. John recalled a much warmer, softer light. With a twitch of surprise, he remembered that Ash had lit the cottage with oil lamps like the ones he had seen in the offices of Stinder Hackleworth. The ambience back then had been almost erotic, the subtle dance of lamplight lending a romantic glow to the living room. Although, John admitted to himself, pretty much everything associated with Ashleigh Zanash had been erotically charged.

  He pulled at the torn wallpaper. There was more paper below, cream in colour and textured. John didn't remember that. The room had been painted a dark colour in his time, red or purple, with gilt-framed paintings hanging on every wall. Now the paintings were gone, as was any trace of the room where Ash had first undressed him, her eyes full of hungry desire.