by Gordon Kerr
After a moment’s silence, John asked, ‘So, what about the book? Will it still happen; can it still be finished?’
Michael had tried not to think too much about it. It meant travelling back inside himself to a landscape that he did not yet feel ready to visit. The book that was due to be published the following year had been a large part of Rosa’s life for the past three years and the trip to Italy, as well as being an attempt to re-awaken their relationship, was also meant to be the opportunity for her to put the finishing touches to it, including the addition of a few final pictures to the magnificent portfolio of landscapes that she had constructed.
‘I really don’t know yet, John. It was almost done, as far as I know.’ And then, feeling tears fill his eyes, ‘I can’t really get to this just yet.’ He wiped his hands across his face and breathed deeply. ‘I guess that’s something else I need to do – get in touch with the publishers and find out what they want me to do.’
They both stared into the middle distance, not really having much more to say to each other. They both knew instinctively that there was simply an emptiness in their relationship that would never again be filled. John knew that he would drift apart from Michael, that Rosa had been the mortar in this friendship and without her, it would inevitably crumble.
‘I’ll develop these rolls tomorrow and send you the contact sheets so that you can let me know which ones I should do more work on,’ John said, standing at the door, Michael’s hand grasped tightly in his own.
‘Thank you, John.’
‘And remember, Michael, if you need anything, if I can help in any way just give me a call,’ he said, turning as he walked down the steps to the road where a taxi was waiting. Guiltily, he felt a sense of relief as he sank into the back-seat of the cab and waved to Michael, smiling as reassuringly as he could.
Michael, too, felt relief as he closed the door and walked back into the lounge. He poured himself another drink – one too many, he thought – and sat down on the sofa, where within a few minutes he had fallen into a deep and, for once, thanks to the whisky, dreamless sleep.
Michael pulled back the curtains and watched a leaf drifting slowly down onto the lawn at the back of the house. There was something odd about it and it only struck him as it settled gently on the grass that it was quite a way from any trees and yet was falling in a vertical manner as if it had fallen from heaven rather than from a tree on earth. He smiled to himself at the thought and turned towards the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. His head felt thick from the whisky of the previous night and his neck was stiff from the position in which he had lain on the sofa. The cold he had felt developing in Italy was beginning to make its presence known and he searched for a piece of kitchen roll to blow his nose and clear his head.
It was seven-thirty and today he would go into the office to pick up whatever pieces he could. He worked in the newsroom of the London Evening Post, a competitive arena in which the time he had spent in Italy could spell trouble for him. Stories had come and gone during his absence. He knew the longer he had been away, the more difficult it would be to get back into the best assignments. These thoughts were worrying him as he walked into the living room and caught sight of the pile of post where he had placed it on the table in the corner. All day yesterday he had ignored it as he busied himself around the flat. He decided he had better sort through it to see if anything demanded his immediate attention.
After sorting through the free newspapers stuffed with leaflets and flyers, he had to take a deep breath before dealing with the post. Rosa’s name was on the front of a number of the envelopes and it was hard for him. Bills – electricity, phone, gas. A couple of attempts by credit companies to get him and/or Rosa to take out loans or open accounts with them. He sorted them into piles – those that would go straight into the bin and those that would have to be dealt with in the next few days. There was a letter from an old friend of his who lived abroad and, with the outline of part of a footprint on one side of it, a card from the Royal Mail with Rosa’s name on the front, saying that it had tried unsuccessfully to deliver a parcel to her. It said he had twenty-eight days to collect it from the sorting office or it would be returned to sender. He checked the date and discovered that he only had one day left before the deadline.
It was bound to be something that Rosa had ordered from a photographic catalogue, but his curiosity was aroused and he resolved to go down to the sorting office as soon as he was dressed. It wasn’t far and the air would do him good after spending the whole of the previous day mooching around the house and then drinking far too much whisky last night.
The sorting office had a 1950s feel to it. It resembled a school building and reminded Michael a little of the large comprehensive school he had attended what seemed like another lifetime ago.
He followed a sign directing him to ‘Collections’, walking through a swing door into a dingy room with a large counter at one end.
In this obviously neglected space, Michael stood feeling similarly neglected. No one came and there was not a sound from anywhere. Behind the counter was a low partition beyond which there were rows of wooden shelving with pigeon holes filled with parcels of all shapes and sizes.
Soon a woman appeared and Michael explained he was collecting a parcel for his wife. The woman absently took the card, checked the address and disappeared into the dinginess behind the partition. She returned after a minute or so with a large brown paper parcel, about a foot by one-and-half feet in size. A typed, white label showed Rosa’s name. Michael showed the woman his driving licence for ID, signed a form and left the office clutching the parcel.
It was soft to the touch and sealed so completely with brown packing tape that, when he got home, he was forced to hunt down a pair of scissors to open it. Inside, wrapped in a piece of thin clear plastic of the kind dry-cleaners use to wrap clothes, he was surprised to find a man’s jacket. He searched for a letter or a note accompanying it and found one in an unsealed envelope, its letter-head denoting that it was from a hotel, the Lighthouse Inn, in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. Puzzled, his eyes quickly took in the short message written on it:
Dear Mrs Keats, we are delighted to be able to return to you a jacket found in the room you occupied during your stay in our hotel in September. We hope to see you again at the Lighthouse Inn soon.’ It was signed ‘J. Stewart, Manager.
Michael’s eyes returned to the jacket. It was light brown with a faint check of a darker hue stitched through it. Expensive, he thought, looking at the label, which displayed an Italian name of which he had never heard. But that was no surprise to him. Fashion and clothes had never been much of an abiding interest with him.
He put the jacket on, approving of the lightness of its cloth, but found that its chest size was at least a couple of sizes bigger than his thirty-eight. The sleeves hung down below his fingertips and the shoulders dropped a couple of inches too low. The owner was undoubtedly a big chap, he thought, eyeing himself in the long mirror that formed one of the doors of a wardrobe in the bedroom. Shame, he thought. I might have just hung on to it had it fitted.
This was obviously some kind of mistake. Rosa had not, to his knowledge, been in Scotland recently. She had gone away in September, the month that the note claimed she had been at the Lighthouse Hotel, but that had been a trip to Newcastle on a photographic assignment for some magazine or other.
Certain that a mistake must have been made, Michael pulled off the jacket, laid it on the bed and resolved to ring the Lighthouse Inn later that day to let them know that they were mistaken and that he would post it back to them.
As he got ready to head into town, however, it nagged at him, tugging at his thoughts. Whenever he tried to push it to one side it would return, like one of those irritating flies that can plague you in a hot climate. You swat them away and within a minute or two they return to buzz around your food or drink. How had the hotel come to connect Rosa with this item of clothing? It was unlikely, after all, that there was another combi
nation of names like hers in the country – Rosa Keats – and, apart from that, how would they have come into possession of her address?
‘Hello, Lighthouse Inn, Mary speaking. How may I help you?’ The voice was soft and musical. He asked to be put through to ‘J. Stewart’ and explained the reason for his call.
‘Well, Mr Keats, the thing is …’ – there was hesitancy in J. Stewart’s voice because the delicacy of the situation had suddenly made itself very apparent to her. Husband receives man’s jacket in post. Jacket doesn’t belong to him but has been left behind by male companion of his wife. ‘… The point is, we were quite certain the jacket belonged to Mrs Keats’s companion because we had the room refurbished shortly before their stay, but found out after they left that the plumber had made a right mess of some of the pipes and water was leaking down onto the ceiling of the room below. When the bed was moved to lift the floorboards, we found the jacket.’ She hesitated, before adding nervously, ‘But, of course, there might be some other explanation.’ There was a silence at the other end. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, eventually.
Surely not, he thought. Oh, Rosa, surely not. There must be some kind of mistake. Ten minutes after he had hung up, he was staring out of the window watching the world go about its business as if nothing had happened, as if everything had not just taken a step in the wrong direction. He had been too embarrassed to pursue the matter further with ‘J. Stewart’ and sensed that she was relieved when he brought the brief conversation to an abrupt close.
They had her address. She had evidently given them that, unashamedly; had had no fears at all about being found out. God, she had been having an affair! What a quaint, old-fashioned way of putting it, he thought – ‘an affair’. Someone else, the owner of this fine, expensive, Italian-tailored jacket, had been screwing his wife.
His first instinct was to pick up the phone and speak to someone, find someone who would tell him what he wanted to hear, that he was being paranoid, that this was all some silly mistake. He started to dial John’s number, but stopped after his finger had angrily pushed three numbers and replaced the receiver, realising that it would mean nothing. What could John do to reassure him? No. Even if he was just being paranoid, he somehow had to prove it. Tears of sadness and frustration began to form in the corners of his eyes. As if the grief and the hurt of her death had not been enough, now he was losing her life as well, was losing all the intimacy of the time they had spent together.
He pressed his face to the glass of the window, his breath spreading mist across it, and moaned like a sick animal.
‘Oh, dear God, Rosa, how could you …?’
The cold November rain splintered on his windscreen, the wipers sweeping furiously from side to side, but failing to make much of an impression on it. The heavens had opened up at Preston and he had been slowed considerably. Lorries, whose sides shouted about the glories of frozen chips or nappies, sped north showering his BMW with spray every time he overtook them, adding to the tiredness that was making the drive so difficult.
He hardly knew why he was doing this, driving to Dumfriesshire in the hope that he could prove that it was all some kind of mistake. It was so important to him that he prove that this was, indeed, the case. If he couldn’t, then the last few years of his life would be completely invalidated. The relationship into which he had invested a vital part of himself would crumble into dust and where would that leave him? Just the thought of it filled him with horror.
The alternative was, of course, to just let it go. Put it down as some bizarre error. Some confusion of identity. Some mistake on his part. Or some miscalculation by Rosa. Perhaps someone had stolen her credit card. Sure, she had not told him it had gone missing, but, of course, she didn’t tell him everything. Perhaps she had just forgotten. They were busy people. There were days when she would be working at the studio until late into the night and he would be fast asleep by the time she came home and flopped into bed. His hours were equally unstable and they had often been like ships that passed in the night, or kissed on the stairs, one coming home, one just going out. Perhaps in the midst of this frenetic existence she had just forgotten to pass on the tiny domestic detail that her card had been stolen in the underground or she had left it at a restaurant and now someone else was using it fraudulently.
This thought had sustained him from Birmingham to Manchester, to the extent that he had come close to turning the car round and heading back to London. But it was no good. He knew she would have cancelled it if it had been lost or stolen and, therefore, it could not have been used by anyone else. No, he had to somehow make it certain in his mind one way or the other. To go back home and have to live with this doubt was unthinkable.
He had left the motorway some miles back and, after following the A75 for a distance that made him think he had gone too far, he came to the small town of Annan. Traffic was bad – it was early evening and the road was filled with people returning home from their day’s work. He should have been doing the same himself, of course, but had phoned Harry, his boss at the Evening Post, this morning to say that he could not get back for another couple of days. Harry had reassured him that it was fine, but Michael had picked up just a tinge of irritation in Harry’s voice. Probably just having a tough day, he thought, but just the same he reckoned it would be unwise to push his luck. At Annan he stopped to get petrol and peered in the dark glow of his interior light at a hotel guide that gave directions to the Lighthouse Inn. He pulled out of the petrol station, rain still spattering on the car windows and followed the sign for the coast road.
About seven miles later, the village he wanted was signposted to the left. It was dark by now and the road was narrow, barely wide enough to take two cars abreast. At least the rain had eased off, however, and the sky was beginning to clear, revealing a bright quarter moon scudding between the clouds.
He came to a village, which consisted of little more than a few houses and a shop, as far as he could see, and then followed the road along what appeared, in the dark, to be a rocky coastline. Then he saw a sign bearing a line drawing of a lighthouse with a beam spitting out of it on all sides. It announced that the Lighthouse Inn was one hundred yards further down the road on the right.
The Lighthouse Inn was an old sandstone building with an empty car park outside. It stood alone, staring grimly out to sea, its slightly lighter outline showing through the darkness. He took his overnight bag from the back of the car, the wind pulling at the car door as he struggled to shut it. He bent into it and ran the few paces to the hotel entrance.
The roar of the wind disappeared suddenly as he closed the door. He placed his bag on the floor and stood there gathering himself, running his hand through his wind-tousled hair.
The Lighthouse Inn took its name seriously, indeed. Its walls were covered in framed photographs and paintings of lighthouses of every description. The window ledges held models of lighthouses, large and small. In the far corner was what he took to be the workings of an old light – huge cogs interlinked and levers stuck out at irregular points. Ropes hung the length of the walls and had been stuck onto the bannisters of the stairs. The overall effect was that of a concept carried too far.
He approached the desk which, like every other surface, was edged with rough rope. The only sound was the cracking and spitting of a large fire, which roared into a huge chimney to his right.
‘Hello?’ He said hesitantly, before repeating it, almost shouting. ‘HE LLO!’
He then turned and surveyed once again the bits of lighthouse that surrounded him.
A distant door opened and the sound of a familiar piece of music emerged – the theme tune to some TV soap or quiz show, he couldn’t quite remember. TV wasn’t really his thing.
‘Good evening, sir, welcome to the Lighthouse Inn.’
She was about twenty-five or so, attractive with blonde hair tied back in a pony-tail and wearing a blue skirt and a similarly-coloured jumper. Her skin had a slight glow about it, the glow that comes from
sitting too close to a good fire.
‘Good evening. I’d like a room, please.’ He put his bag on the floor and rubbed his hands together to get some feeling back into them after the iciness of the wind outside.
‘Would that just be for the one night, sir?’ she said, handing him a form on which were spaces for his name, address and credit card details.
‘Yes, I think so,’ he replied.
‘Well, if you change your mind and want to stay longer, it won’t be a problem. We’re a wee bit quiet at the moment.’ Her Scottish accent was soft and precise and she had a slow, lambent smile that, when it flickered across her face, struck him as being well worth the wait.
‘Is Mrs Stewart in tonight?’ he asked, handing her the completed form and reaching into his pocket for his wallet so that she could swipe his credit card.
‘Oh no, Jacquie went home ages ago, but she’ll be in early tomorrow morning.’ She handed him his key, directing him to the first floor and added. ‘Enjoy your stay … Oh, and if you’re hungry or want a drink, the bar’s open.’ She indicated a doorway to his left, under the stairs. ‘The restaurant’s closed tonight, but I can do you a toasted sandwich and some salad, if you want.’
‘Thanks, I think I might just take you up on that,’ he replied, smiling. ‘Give me fifteen minutes to freshen up.’
‘See you in fifteen minutes then,’ she said, filing away his form and letting another of those smiles drift across her face.
The hotel had an out-of-season atmosphere. It felt as if it were in hibernation. Needless to say, his room persisted with the lighthouse theme. The walls once again provided a photographic record, it seemed, of every lighthouse in the world and the window was round like an enlarged porthole. Nonetheless, it was clean, comfortable and quite spacious.