by Emlyn Rees
‘So much for charming the locals,’ Scott replied.
Ellen glanced at the young Australian by her side, suddenly remembering all the positive things she’d said on their long drive down here from London. ‘Thank you,’ she called out after the boy. But it was far too late and her voice was lost in the wind.
She turned to see Scott failing to hide an amused smirk. ‘Oh, get on with it!’ Ellen exclaimed, pushing the Australian playfully in the direction of the car.
Beside the cottage’s scuffed front door, Ellen groped inside the wooden post box until she found the key. So much for the friendly welcome note, she thought, as she waggled the old-fashioned iron key in the lock, but the door was swollen with damp and wasn’t budging.
She let out a growl of frustration and glanced towards the car, but she was determined not to rely on Scott for help yet again. She might be nearly ten years older than him but, at thirty-four, she wasn’t past it yet. Standing tall in her fake-fur coat, she twisted the brass handle again and heaved her shoulder against the door. It took a few more hefty pushes before the door suddenly gave and she fell down the step into the living room, twisting her foot on the way.
Inside, the cottage was so lopsided it would’ve made her feel like limping, even if she hadn’t fallen. The low plaster ceiling sloped down at an acute angle and the staircase looked as if it had collapsed drunkenly against the wall, so that the only way to climb up would be to skulk up sideways.
‘Jesus. It’s minute,’ said Scott, pushing in behind her with one of the camera cases and heaving the oversized chintz armchair out of the way to make room.
With two of them in the doorway, the cottage felt horribly oppressive.
‘It’s … er … quaint,’ said Ellen, searching for the right word, as she surveyed the dusty arrangement of dried flowers in the fire grate and the dresser crammed with an audience of sour-faced china figurines. ‘It’ll just have to do.’
Hobbling across the threadbare rug to the far corner of the room, she pushed aside the bead curtain and peeped into the tiny square of kitchen. An ancient gas cooker was wedged level with a telephone directory and a tap dripped against a green beard of limescale in the sink. ‘Ah!’ she said ominously. She turned back to face Scott, blowing up over her face in the idiosyncratic gesture she’d kept, even though her fringe-heavy bob had recently been replaced by a sleek blonde crop. ‘OK. So we’ll get the rest of the stuff in,’ she said, injecting as much bravado into her voice as she could, ‘then we’ll have a cuppa and work out what to do.’
‘You’re the boss.’
By the time they’d lugged in all their equipment, Ellen was sweating as she hauled her bag up the stairs. Pushing down the latch on the arched wooden door, she dipped her head and stopped on the threshold of the first bedroom, her nostrils filling with the acrid smell of damp. It was then that her positive attitude cracked and the picture of rustic charm she’d drawn in her mind finally crashed around her like a broken mirror.
Instead of the sunlight-infused sanctuary of her imagination, complete with a gigantic iron bed, sumptuous home-made quilt and tasteful soft furnishings, what lay before her was more like a nun’s cell; the white walls faded to a dull grey, with no decoration except for a tin crucifixion sculpture, which looked like a misshapen cake mould.
With a sinking heart, Ellen threw her Burberry holdall on the high single bed, but it bounced off immediately, as if the lumps beneath the nylon bedspread had angrily repelled it. As she watched the bag thump on to its side, there was the unmistakable chink as something – no doubt her bottle of bath oil in her wash bag, or worse, her perfume – smashed deep inside.
Steeling herself not to lose it, Ellen stepped over the bag to the sash window where a net curtain twitched in the cold draft. Edging past the dressing table, where a forlorn lace doily was Blu-tacked, she yanked aside the curtain and unfastened the brass clasp, thumping the heels of her hands against the flaking sash window frame until it yielded and flew upwards. Then she thrust her head through the open window and, leaning on the wide sill, took a deep breath.
Below her there was a thin strip of cobbled road before the thick harbour wall, but from the bedroom window it felt as if Ellen was right on the edge of it, looking down a dizzying fifty-foot drop to the harbour floor. There, the cold tide nudged the fishing boats afloat, their lengths of chain emerging from the mud as if connected to a sinister underworld below.
Looking up to where the mud turned into a sweeping arc of sand, she could see a concrete ramp dotted with heaps of nets leading to a jumble of masts and machinery in the boatyard. Along the path there was an abandoned fish and chip van with one wheel missing, then a tiny stone chapel, which was completely overshadowed by a concrete reinforced cliff rising up to the front.
Behind the ornamental gardens and railings at the top she could make out a row of ostentatious Victorian houses, their windows lifeless behind the cast-iron balustrades. Beside them was a crumbling art deco building that was probably once a cinema or a bingo hall, but was now boarded up, and along from that an ugly Sixties block dominated the view, a tidemark of dirt visible halfway up the pale concrete wall. Beyond the town the land stretched up, patchy grass punctuating the furrows of dark mud, where a lone horse grazed.
Ellen took another lungful of salty air and sighed, feeling a pang of homesickness as she thought about Jason. He’d be at the airport right now on his way to South America for his latest adventurous filming expedition. Spot the difference, she thought gloomily as she surveyed the sleepy off-season seaside town before her.
She didn’t begrudge Jason the obvious excitement and satisfaction he’d found since his rainforest wildlife series had come off, but Ellen couldn’t help feeling peeved at how unconcerned he seemed to be about being apart from her. And, if she were really honest, she was jealous.
‘But you’ll be away too,’ Jason had reasoned last night, in the bedroom of their Clerkenwell apartment.
‘It’s not the same,’ Ellen had replied, rubbing moisturiser into her face and glancing behind her at Jason in the long wardrobe mirrors. He’d been fresh from the shower, a tan sarong wrapped loosely round his slim waist, as he’d stood by their handmade teak bed, fiddling with the small ebony pendant he always wore on a leather thong round his neck. Even undressed, he’d looked cool, in the eccentric way that was all his own. There’d been something sexy about him, an aura of untouchable manliness that Ellen had always found irresistible. He was the same age as her, but Ellen had always had the feeling that Jason wouldn’t age. He’d always looked the same, as if he were deeply comfortable in his tanned olive skin, with his smiling grey-green eyes behind long, curly lashes. But his most distinctive feature had always been his untameable mane of deep auburn-brown curls, which Ellen had watched him tie back in a band.
The smooth linen duvet in front of him had been covered in neatly ironed piles of Ellen’s shirts and trousers, and a messy small jumble of his shorts and T-shirts, which he’d been about to pack.
‘Oh Jase, stop,’ Ellen had begged, turning round and walking to his side. ‘At least let me iron your things.’
Jason had chuckled at her concern. ‘Believe me, where I’m going there’d be absolutely no point in having anything dry, let alone ironed.’
Ellen had looked down at him shovelling the clothes into his ancient rucksack, and had felt childish tears welling up. She’d had a bad feeling about Jason going off on this trip all week and now it had got to the night before them both going their separate ways, she’d felt desperate to hold on to him. At least when Jason usually went filming she was at home in a place he knew, but with them both away they’d be more disconnected than ever.
‘Don’t look like that,’ Jason had said softly, drawing her into his embrace. ‘The month will fly by.’
‘You see! You won’t miss me at all,’ Ellen had blurted out accusingly, looking up into Jason’s face.
His jaw was usually covered with stubble, his eyes sleep-starved, but las
t night he’d been groomed and clean-shaven, and he’d looked like the man she’d first fallen in love with over a decade ago when she’d been a graduate trainee at the BBC and he’d turned up one day with a camera crew.
‘You want to bet?’ he’d said so tenderly that her petulant mood had instantly dissolved. ‘I’ll miss you all the time. Particularly this bit,’ he’d said as he’d pulled aside the edge of her thick white robe and had kissed her neck. ‘But then again, I might miss this bit a bit more,’ he’d continued as he’d traced soft kisses down her collarbone and Ellen had started to laugh.
Then he’d hooked his foot round her ankle and effortlessly tripped her up so that she’d fallen softly on to the bed. As he’d landed gently on top of her, he’d pulled open her robe and continued his descent, and Ellen had looked up at the soft pools of light from the designer up-lighters she’d installed in their room, relishing each kiss and trying not to mind too much that her neat piles of clothes would have to be refolded. After all, she’d thought, this one was going to have to last her.
Now Ellen closed her eyes briefly, breathing in the sea air as she savoured the memory of last night. ‘It’s going to be fine,’ she said out loud. ‘Be calm. You can do this. You can –’
But she didn’t get any further, before her ears filled with a terrifying scream, as an enormous seagull swooped towards her, its sharp yellow beak open, its beady eyes shining as it missed her by inches. Ellen froze as it arced away from her before wheeling back, obviously intent on making another malicious swipe.
‘Shit!’ Ellen darted back inside the window, banging the back of her head on the bottom of it, as the seagull swooped past. Slamming the window shut, she leapt away, holding her head as she turned to see Scott in the doorway. ‘It’s like a fucking Hitchcock movie!’ she said, as the seagull shrieked with victory on the other side of the window.
Scott shrugged unsympathetically. ‘I’ve got bunk beds,’ he said, flicking his head in the direction of his room. ‘And there’s no phone socket, which means our fax and e-mail are busted.’
‘Oh, God. This is a disaster,’ said Ellen, hauling up her holdall from the floor on to the bed. ‘I’m so sorry. I should never have trusted Joy.’
Ellen might have known that Joy, the most unhelpful production secretary on the face of the planet, the woman whose only mission in life was to see Ellen fail, would find the smallest, most inhospitable place in the entire town, just to wind her up. Now she felt angry for not paying more attention to details like this herself.
She’d assumed that renting a cottage would be the logical thing to do, since she would be travelling between Shoresby and London on an ad hoc basis each week, spending days at the editing suite in Soho so that she could finish off the other programmes, while sorting out the shoot in Shoresby. And since Scott was short of freelancing work, Ellen had suggested that he stay down here the whole time, as a sort of low-paid holiday. Joy, though, obviously hadn’t had comfort at the forefront of her mind.
Considering that Ellen thought of herself as fairly easygoing, it had come as a shock when Joy had taken an instant dislike to her when she’d joined APWW, the small independent television production company, a few months ago. Joy had made no secret of the fact that she thought Ellen had insufficient experience to take over Amanda’s role, dismissing Ellen’s previous job at the BBC. Coming from an editorial rather than a directing background, Ellen knew there was a grain of truth in Joy’s opinion, which was why, even though she now felt thrown in at the deep end, she was determined to make this trip a success.
‘Look, I’ll see if I can sort something else out,’ Ellen said, sensing Scott’s disappointment and following him down the stairs. Finding the pre-set office number on her phone directory, she punched in the call command.
But there was no reception. No reception on the state-of-the-art mobile she had bought specifically for this trip.
It had been a long time since Ellen had been in a phone box. The ones near her flat in London were covered with graffiti and the phones had mostly gone (it being the part of Clerkenwell that was still to up and come). Therefore, finding a functioning old-fashioned public phone was a novelty. So was trying to do business in a metre-square office.
Wedging her boot up against the glass and the phone on her shoulder, she pulled off her pen lid with her teeth. Then, opening the plastic folder and jostling all her notes to make them balance on her thigh, she dropped some change into the slot and dialled the office number.
She could imagine Joy in the small kitchenette in the tiny West End office, scowling at the phone as she took her time squeezing out the teabag in her mug. Eventually, she answered, and, after the briefest of pleasantries, Ellen got straight to the point. ‘There’s a couple of things. We need permission from the American owner of Appleforth House to film there and on the land near Lost Soul’s Point. But there’s no permission letter here in Amanda’s notes.’
Joy did one of her dismissive sniffs. ‘You’ve got everything there is,’ she said. ‘If something’s missing it’s not my fault.’
‘I’m not saying it is, but could you chase it … if you have a mo—?’
‘I suppose I’ll need a fax number for you, then.’
‘I’ll get on to it right away and phone you one later this morning,’ said Ellen, relieved that she’d clinched a commitment out of Joy. ‘And … um … one more thing?’
‘Yes?’ Joy said, her voice loaded with irritation.
‘Did you have a list of Bed and Breakfasts or hotels here? It’s just that the cottage is a bit on the small side for both me and Scott –’
No sooner were the words out of her mouth than Joy interrupted indignantly. ‘I got you the cheapest accommodation I could find. You said you wanted to save on the budget so that you could do the extra filming down there –’
‘OK, OK. I hear you.’
It was true that Ellen had pushed through the idea of including the full story of the suicides at Lost Soul’s Point in a series of documentaries about the myths behind British landmarks. Amanda, the series producer, who’d left Ellen in charge, had already made several programmes around the country and had only wanted Ellen to supervise a few shots of Lost Soul’s Point with a tiny voice-over. And then to fill the rest of the programme with interviews with people in Shoresby. But Ellen had argued that including a full account of the story of the nineteenth-century girl who’d thrown herself on to the rocks after having had her heart broken by her lover was a sure way to bring a touch of class to the programme. And with the reconstructed drama she had in mind, the programme would spring to life.
But now she was aware of the vast gulf between the discussions she’d had in her office and the reality of being here. She’d been so eager to pull off her first project that she’d flippantly dismissed anyone’s help and had batted away Amanda’s scepticism about filming in the autumn, when the light was bound to be dreadful. Now, she’d barely been in gloomy Shoresby an hour and already there seemed to be a million problems.
Ellen pressed the receiver against her forehead, feeling completely out of her depth. She knew she shouldn’t call Amanda, but she was the only one who’d been here before when they’d researched the series six months ago. Surely a few words of encouragement couldn’t do any harm. Ellen took a deep breath and dialled. ‘Amanda,’ she said. ‘Look I’m sorry to call you at home, but –’
Ellen stopped immediately. On the other end of the phone Amanda let out a strained gasp.
‘Oh, my God!’ Ellen exclaimed, her notes falling off her knees and scattering like a snowdrift on the phone box floor. ‘You’re not …’
‘No. Just Braxton Hicks.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘For God’s sake … Pretend contractions …’ Amanda puffed. ‘Bloody painful. What is it?’
‘Nothing. It’s nothing. Nothing at all. Go back to your … I’m …’ Ellen replaced the receiver quickly. ‘Fine,’ she said, finishing her sentence aloud, as the money clunked down in
to the phone. Ellen bit her lip, listening to the wind punching the side of the phone box.
What was she doing calling Amanda? Surely the whole point of being in charge was just that, to be in charge, even if it did mean feeling scarily alone. Annoyed with herself for being such a wimp, she scrabbled around to pick up her notes and stuffed them inside her folder. After all, how difficult could this really be?
A greasy chip packet whipped in a whirlwind by her feet as Ellen hurried out of the phone box and set off to find the hotel they’d passed on the way into town. Standing still, she couldn’t remember whether she should head up the cobbled road, or whether they’d come round on the road to the left. Plumping for the tarmac option to the left, she put her head down and headed off.
Soon, though, as the road headed up and away from the harbour, she was completely disorientated. Stopping by an estate agent’s, she looked at the pictures of shabby bungalows and holiday caravans for sale, and all the optimistic things she’d said to her friends about basking in the restorative powers of the sea air now seemed silly and naïve.
Crossing over the road into a race of skipping leaves along the pavement, Ellen was narrowly missed by a four-by-four towing a rattling boat trailer, followed by a post van. Ahead, beyond the open trapdoors in the pavement, where a publican was taking in several barrels of beer, Ellen could see that the road widened out into a main square where the shops were starting to open.
She instinctively clutched the leather wallet in her pocket and flicked the edge of her Selfridges store card as she walked through the town centre. But it looked as if she’d have to try very hard to find anything worth buying. Granted, there was a typical seaside surf shop, called Wave Cave, but other than that, the whole town seemed to have had a style bypass.
Well, it’s certainly a challenge, Ellen thought, edging past a couple of woolly-hatted old ladies chatting outside the post office and noticing a pretty alley running down the side of Woolworths. With a bit of sunshine and a clever camera angle from behind the holly bushes in the churchyard, she might just succeed in making this place look vaguely decent.