‘You see that hill up there?’ I pointed. ‘It’s supposed to have a dragon living under it, sitting on a huge pot of gold.’
Link’s eyebrows shot up. ‘And that stops the signal?’
‘I think it’s more that it’s four hundred and fifty metres high that does it. Not much gets over that.’
‘How the hell do you all live?’ He shook the phone to emphasise our technological poverty. ‘It’s barbaric! Not even texts.’
‘We’re used to it. And we live in the same way as people lived for hundreds of years before mobiles were invented – we talk to one another. Ow.’ My foot bent underneath me and my toe was subjected to more pressure than it could accommodate.
‘What did you do?’ Link looked down at my unpedicured feet in the sandals, ridiculously summery for March. My unpainted nails stared back. ‘Looks sore.’
‘I kicked something. It’s all right, it’s only bruised, when you work with horses you learn to recognise a broken toe just by the shading, and this isn’t that bad. It’ll just hurt for a day or so.’
Link reached out and lightly touched my rapidly blackening nail. ‘I’ve got some Arnica cream you could put on it.’
There was a commotion of disturbed blackbird in front of us and then Phinn appeared. He stared for a second and then dropped the four-pint plastic container of milk he’d been carrying. It hit the stone path and split, sending a fountain of white liquid spraying up over Phinn’s legs which he didn’t even acknowledge, he just kept staring at Link and me. Then, paying no attention to the lactic accident pooling around his feet, he walked past us, keeping his eyes on the front door until he’d gone through it. It slammed behind him with such force that the windows sang in their loose frames.
‘What the hell was that about?’ I stood up, wincing.
Link shrugged. ‘Dunno. Think he’s off on one. He’s been really odd with me. Can’t speak, doesn’t want to go out, can’t even drag him to the pub for a meal and, considering all we’ve got in is tinned macaroni cheese which tastes like Play-Doh, must mean there’s something up with the man.’
‘Have you tried talking to him?’
Link pulled a face and pointed to his groin. ‘In possession of a full set, which I’d rather like to keep. Anyway, testosterone exempts me from all that “touchy feely” stuff, that’s your department.’
‘Great. Thanks.’ Now resigned to having to have some kind of conversation with Phinn I levered open the door and went into the house, where there was no sign of him. I wandered through the downstairs rooms which mazed around a central passageway, making me realise that the door we all used wasn’t the main front door to the house but the side kitchen door. The real main door lay to the west, where the old driveway used to run and it opened into the impressive entrance hall, tiled and panelled, with a huge oak staircase ascending from it into the dark heavens. My failure to find Phinn on these lower levels drove me up the stairs, which creaked and muttered with each footstep, as though I walked through a field of ghosts.
The upper landing was equally darkly panelled. All the doors were shut so no light penetrated and I had to grope my way around using the handrail. ‘Phinn? Are you up here?’ I called softly. There were shadows here, things which moved independent of light sources, creaks and groans that reminded me of skulls that screamed. Somewhere above my head a door slammed and I jumped. All I could think of now was the Thing That Moaned, and I ran until I found myself at the foot of another staircase, pine this time, cheaply made and installed to give access to the attics. I shot up the stairs and past an internal balcony towards the door at the far end of the house, which must have been the one that slammed, although it was standing open now.
And on the other side of it, resting his forehead against an almost impenetrably dusty window, stood Phinn. He had his eyes shut and his arms wrapped tightly around his ribcage. As I stood just inside the doorway, panting and trying to quiet my heartbeat, my footsteps silenced by the dust, I saw him raise a hand and scrub at his cheek, then flick his fingers across his eyelids as though chasing away tears. ‘Phinn?’
He jumped so hard that his head bounced off the windowpane. ‘Molly? Ow, what the hell are you doing up here?’
He was trying for composure, trying to pretend everything was normal but I could see the tracks of moisture down his face and the clumpiness of his eyelashes. His eyes looked like walkways into hell.
‘I came to see if you were all right. You looked … if this is about last night then it’s stupid. Unnecessary. That was just a … a nothing.’
He went back to resting his face against the window. ‘No. It’s complicated, Moll. I’ve got no right, no claim, nothing.’ A deep breath in made the cobwebs dance. ‘Just one question though. Did it have to be him?’
‘I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’ I walked right into the little room now. It looked as though it had once been a nursery or a maid’s room; bare boards showed a pale square where a rug had once stood in front of a rusty iron firegrate and there was just room for a small bed or a cot against the wall. The dust lay thick and stifling, but the cold was like something solid.
‘You and Link. I shouldn’t be surprised, I know. I mean he’s worth, what, two mill a year? Enough to turn any girl’s head, and most of her other parts as well, but I thought, well, with last night …’
I’d finished the extended limp that had taken me right across the floor and now I stood behind him. Watching his reflection in the dirty window. ‘Writing greetings card rhymes is worth two million pounds a year? I am so in the wrong job.’
A half snort of laughter misted a single pane. ‘No. Writing poetry is just what he does to make him look sensitive. He’s a Trust Fund boy, our Link. I’m surprised you didn’t know, it’s usually the first thing he tells women. And if you know the second thing he tells them, I’m surprised you’re still here.’
‘Is it groin-related?’
Now he turned round completely to let me see the devastation on his face. ‘I’m just thick, Molly, that’s all,’ he said wearily. ‘Thick and ignorant and tired. You’re welcome to him, course you are. Best of luck.’ And he waved a hand which then fell heavily by his side.
‘Why are you being like this? I’m nothing to do with Link. Bloody hell, he’s still stuck somewhere around the Stone Age where women are concerned, isn’t he?’ Cautiously I touched his shoulder. ‘What’s this really about?’
Another huge breath in which I could feel by the way his shoulders moved. ‘Jealousy, betrayal, guilt, oh, you name it I’ve got it. I’m like a walking psychological diagnosis, Molly.’ And now he sighed that breath out. ‘Yesterday Link said something. He didn’t even realise what he’d said, he just carried on as if … it was something Suze told him. Something about me.’
I felt my stomach flip as though the feel of him moving under my hand had closed some circuit around my body. I wanted to clutch at it, to stop it betraying me like this, to reassure myself that it was only hunger or anxiety or even pity making me feel as though my innards were falling into a bottomless pit dragging my heart with them.
‘So Suze talked to Link about you, so what?’ I heard myself say, whilst my brain fought to push my organs back to their rightful places.
‘No. You don’t understand. Suze and Link … he was my best man, course he was, who else would I choose but … they didn’t talk, him and her, not really. Not like that. But he still knew. He quoted her, like what she’d said was important enough to remember. And it made me think and … you know what I think?’
‘You think your wife and Link were having an affair?’
He raised an arm and, with his forearm he rubbed a clear stretch of window. Dust scraped along his skin like a bruise. ‘I’ve been wondering for a while … when she left me, she went to someone. I knew Suze, she’d have got an escape route all lined up before she ran out on our marriage, some guy she’d been running as a second string all along in case things went bad.’
‘I
’m sorry, Phinn.’ I gave his shoulder a quick pat. ‘But you might be wrong, you know. You should talk to him.’
He gave a short, hard laugh. ‘Would you? You won’t even answer the phone … talking to Link won’t make it better, it’ll just make me want to curl up and die even more than I do now.’ He turned away from the window and caught at my hand as it slipped from his shoulder. ‘I can feel my whole life sliding away from underneath me, Molly. Everything I was ever certain of, everything I worked for, that I wanted, it’s all moving under my feet so that I can’t tell which way I’m facing any more.’
I looked at his hand where it held mine in a loose grasp. ‘There’s still your work,’ I said tentatively.
‘No. There really isn’t. I walked out on them. Oh, I know I said it was a sabbatical and all that rubbish but … look, I was drunk, I chucked it all in. Wasn’t thinking straight, wasn’t thinking at all, all I knew was that I didn’t want to be there, staring at yet another download from the space telescope and trying to get a bunch of students interested in dark energy measurements. I couldn’t keep doing it, and that’s the truth. So now, here I am, no money, no job and a house that’s so full of ghosts and memories that I can’t tell which decade I’m in.’
He used his sleeve to wipe his eyes as I stood mesmerised, held rigid by the feel of his cold fingers and the soft brush of his sweater sleeve against my arm.
He was half turned towards me, our bodies touching down one side. I could sense the rise and fall of his breathing and see each fine hair where his overlong stubble was struggling to turn to beard against his cheeks. I wanted to step right in, to let his arms close around me. It felt as though I was poised on the edge of some terrible precipice, safe for the moment but at any second and with any movement I would fall. As my heart already had.
‘I need a friend, Molly,’ I heard him say distantly, as though he already lay at the bottom of that immense drop. ‘I just need someone … something right now.’ The grip on my hand tightened.
Various scenarios played through my head. Did I let him know how I felt? Did I tell him that I was afraid that I was falling in love here? Or did I let my body do the talking for me, slide myself inside that dark zone around him until he couldn’t mistake my intentions? And then his words trickled through that pink hazy mind-set, slowed my heartbeat and cooled my brain. That’s how you worked it, not him. You were the one who did the ‘save me, save me’s’, don’t put your MO onto him. He wants a friend. Not a lover. Just a friend. Be told.
‘Mike rang me.’ I let those words blurt out, safe in the knowledge that they’d stop anything else coming through, anything I might regret. ‘He wants you to call him back. Something about, maybe, a job with the BBC?’
Phinn let my hand drop. ‘You are joking.’
‘Nope. A show about science fiction? Something like that. They need a presenter, stat.’ I told him about my sending the YouTube clip and Mike’s Beeb connections and all the while I watched as Phinn’s head came up, his spine straightened and he became the man who’d stood up on that moor with the wind in his hair and the stars in his eyes.
‘Wow. No, really, Molly. Wow.’
‘Yes, wow. Good timing or what?’ I hooked my hair back behind my ears and turned away from him so that he wouldn’t see the slightly desperate look that I was sure must be radiating out of my eyes. ‘You can use my house phone. Better do it soon, I think they’re pretty worried at that end.’
And I limped my way out determined that Phinn would never find out the extent of the way things had suddenly changed for me in that tiny room.
Chapter Sixteen
Phinn leaned his head back against the train seat and watched as the world moved backwards past him, pulling him towards Yorkshire again.
That has to have been the most bizarre few days of my life, he thought, letting his lids block out the scenery top to bottom. Scrubbed up, dropped in front of camera with a script that had made no sense until he’d rewritten it, screen-tested with his credentials checked until they squeaked. And then they’d ummed and aahhed and poked him and tied his hair back then let it loose again, tried him without his glasses and with and finally sucked their teeth as though they were about to buy a second-hand car and offered him the job.
His spine crept as he remembered accepting, giving them provisos that they’d nodded through, and then they’d enthused about his expertise and his looks, how ‘right’ he was for their programme, prodded him a bit more and then sent him shopping with his new ‘assistant’, Annie, a woman who looked like a very thin shark, to buy ‘cutting edge’ clothes. Now he was dressed in razor-sharp jeans with a collarless shirt under a Prada jacket, clothes he loved so much that he refused to take them off after the trying-on session and they’d had to let him walk away in. He’d never felt so … so … cool.
He’d shaved too and the make-up girl had trimmed his hair, then told him he looked like some rock star guy he’d never heard of. He’d been baffled but had still let himself feel that tiny tickle of unaccustomed vanity, spared a very short moment to wonder what Molly would say when she saw him, then dismissed both pride and prognosis. It was stupid to wonder and even more stupid to care.
He flipped open his laptop and continued his research into the subject which haunted him more than it had any reason to. The lights. Those weird, almost sentient lights which came from nowhere, seemed to display themselves purely for his and Molly’s bemusement and then vanished into equal nothingness. Lights which didn’t seem to tally with any UAP sighting recorded anywhere, in fact the nearest equivalent seemed to be—
‘Earthlights.’ He didn’t realise he’d spoken aloud until the woman sitting opposite him raised her eyebrows. ‘Like the Berwyn Mountains case? But …’
He tapped a couple more keys, slightly worried when the woman smiled and kept her eyes on him. It was one thing to know you looked cool, but it was quite another for other people to appreciate it, so he crouched down a bit, putting his screen between him and her. Kept tapping keys so as not to get engaged in conversation whilst letting his mind fret over the problem of what he was going to say to Link when he got back.
Molly had been right, he had to talk to him. Had to find out, one way or the other, what Suze and his friend had been to one another, if they’d been anything. And if they had been … lovers, if she had run to Link when she’d had enough of trying to be a good wife to a man who lived so much inside his head … what else had she told him?
He felt that cold wash of shame as he typed away, it raised a blush he could see reflected in the screen, making him lower his head until his chin almost touched his chest to avoid his red cheeks being noticed. Suze had been so right about him, he was needy and emotionally desperate. Pathetic.
‘Hopeless,’ he said aloud again. This got him a sympathetic smile.
Suze knew me inside out. She knew my fears, my foibles, she knew my frailties. And she enumerated them to me that night, took all my inner uncertainties and made them certain. Made everything I secretly suspected about myself a huge, concrete absolute. Because I’m not a man, not a real man. Not like Link, with his disposable attitude to women. I should love ’em and leave ’em, not wrap my heart around them. It’s needy. It’s useless. I shouldn’t care, however much I want to, because women want men who can survive, who can carry them through a swamp on one arm whilst killing bears with the other hand. Short-sighted, depressive guys whose only expertise is in theoretical science need not apply.
He sighed and let his head fall back onto the cushion. It was darkening outside, trees had become sketches against the sky, and he felt a curious desire to be home, at Howe End. Cold, almost furnitureless, bare floored – home. Maybe Molly would let him borrow her bath again, if he promised not to break in to use it. Maybe she’d read through his research into the lights and make some suggestions. Maybe she’d at least give him the time of day and not notice how his blood pressure rose a little every time she came into the room. Or into his mind. Maybe she’d be kind.
* * *
‘Your man’s back.’ Caro threw straw around the loose-box as I wheeled the full barrow out to the muck heap, calling over her shoulder as I passed.
‘Which man?’ My load wobbled and threatened to spill across the yard and I had to concentrate to keep it level.
‘Your sexy scientist.’ She leaned on the door watching my ferocious attempts not to care. ‘I just saw him when I opened up the barn.’
‘He’s not a “scientist”. He’s a physicist,’ I said pedantically, fighting the weight of the barrow as it oscillated, using its distraction to keep my mind steady.
‘Yeah, but saying sexy physicist sounds like I’m learning to whistle. Anyway, he’s back. But I can clearly see you’re not interested from the way you’ve gone all pink and that barrow is starting to get away from you. Look, let me do it, you go and find out what he wants.’
I stopped wrangling the barrow and straightened up. ‘Why would he want anything?’
Caro gave me a level look. ‘Well, he was standing at your front door. He either wants to talk to you, or to have another illicit bath, and either way I think you ought to be there.’
The metal supports of the wheelbarrow gouged the cobbles as I stepped back, brushing my hands down my jodhpurs. ‘I … yes, you’re right.’
‘And you look fine. Glowing. Nicely healthy.’ She raised her eyebrows at me. ‘Mind, you might smell a bit.’ She had to call that last bit after me as I dashed from the yard and across the road, dropping back into as nonchalant a saunter as I could manage when I saw the back view of Phinn still standing outside my front door, poised to give the knocker a little more punishment.
‘The door’s not locked,’ I said mildly. ‘You could just go straight in, you usually do.’
He jumped, flinching like a bitten horse. ‘Molly!’
‘Hi.’ Wow, he looked good. Tidier, a bit sharper round the edges. And his clothes were fantastic. ‘How long have you been back?’ I walked past him and opened the door, kicking off my boots on the step. He hesitated, then copied me.
How I Wonder What You Are Page 16