‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘I’m going to look after you.’ And she said nothing, blinking, a secret stupid excitement inside her.
But then he was turning, briskly. ‘Come on, then.’
Getting out of London had seemed to take hours, but Alison had been grateful for every crawling minute. Stuck in traffic round arterial roads, between parades of houses and trees sooty with a century of exhaust fumes, past Turkish bakeries and fried chicken shops and used-car forecourts. Creeping through the suburbs, Alison covertly observed Paul’s driving, and his car; she hadn’t seen either before. The car was small and sensible and so clean it might have been hoovered. Paul was a confident, slightly impatient driver, too long in the leg for the car and shifting in his seat every time they got stuck in the sluggish traffic.
His phone had rung once and although they were stationary at that point his hand had gone straight to divert it. At last the lanes had multiplied, the shops and pavements disappeared behind siege-strength walls and the sprawling outskirts abruptly receded in the rear-view mirror. Paul straightened in his seat with visible relief; Alison realised she was pushing back in hers, as if bracing herself.
By the time the estuary came into view it was evening, but not dark yet. They topped a slope and there it was, spread out, grey and silver, the low rays of a midsummer sun glinting off the mirrored cube of the power station, far out towards the horizon. Even from miles inland Alison could see that the tide was out, the meandering channels gleamed all the way to where brown water met the bruised-blue sky. If she closed her eyes she would smell the trickle of sea over mud, she would see the bristly lavender-grey plant that grew among the creeks. As they turned down the shallow incline around them the fields and orchards and hedges were luminous green in the low, flat midsummer light and she felt it, the thing she’d been resisting – not fear but the sweet yearning tug of home.
‘Look,’ said Paul, ‘that’s quite something, isn’t it?’ His head turned quickly to see her reaction but she only stared straight ahead, as though she was the one driving. It was like a great slow green wave pulling her down, washing and turning, her childhood a tide coming up to reclaim her.
He turned back. ‘Morgan grew up here,’ he said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Can you imagine that?’
Five miles or so from their destination they had stopped for a late lunch. Without saying anything Paul had indicated and pulled in at a thatched pub beside a pond. The Plough: she must have passed it a hundred times as a child in the back of her parents’ car. Someone they knew had even worked here, though she couldn’t remember who. As she sat in the garden it crowded in on her, the bulrushes in the pond, the leaning apple tree, the swinging pub sign, all horribly familiar, bringing with it the smell of the seats in the car, the line of her mother’s jaw as she leaned into the back to tell them off, her father’s hands on the wheel.
When the waitress came out for their order and she was too young to have been more than a baby the last time Alison was here, she realised she’d been holding her breath, half dreading, half wanting a face she knew. Aware of his eyes on her she ate up every last crumb of her meal though it took an effort to remember what she’d actually eaten. Chicken pie, glutinous and pale, green beans. Watery coffee, some kind of cake with icing. Every time the gawping, near-wordless waitress came out with the laminated menu Paul would start to shake his head but Alison would take it from her and order something else she didn’t want, just to postpone the moment. In the end Paul had jumped up and gone inside for the bill, leaving her at the table.
In the car now as they crested the last long shallow incline to the estuary, Alison turned to look at him.
‘Don’t you like it?’ she said, before she could stop herself. ‘Not good enough for Morgan?’
‘It’s beautiful,’ he said, and she could see that he meant it, the great silvered expanse of estuary reflected in his face as he drove. ‘That’s what I meant. Don’t you think so?’
And now they were coming fast down between high hedges, the sinking sun behind them. At intervals Alison registered a cottage – a long wall, a big shabby barn alone in a field, a row of poplars – and knew them instantly, one after the other, without even turning her head to look. Every feature of the landscape crowded in as the little car descended towards the first village houses, jostling for her attention. The apprehension she’d been holding at bay since they left London bloomed until it was all around her, there was nothing she could look at that would not hurtle her back thirteen years except the sealed interior of the car. She closed her eyes. She surrendered.
‘You all right?’ She blinked her eyes open. Paul had turned to look at her just as they came into a bend, too fast, a low building loomed and filled Alison’s line of vision and she saw dusty windows and a lopsided gate. He wrenched at the wheel and they were round.
But too late: she was back, she was here.
‘Sorry,’ said Paul, shaken. He changed gear, slowed the car right down, breathed out. ‘Nasty bend.’
‘Country roads,’ she said. ‘Give me London any day.’ And Paul made a sound of assent but he was concentrating on the road now. Alison looked back again surreptitiously, trying to remember. She’d spent so long trying not to, it was a rusty mechanism; how did you do it? Detail. One dark stormy evening, a November night, a friend of Joe’s, hit by a car on an unlit road. He’d died.
Things jostled in the luminous twilight. There was more to remember, a whole forgotten childhood unfolded in colours, showed her how grey her life had been since. There had been days on the water, borrowing someone’s boat, dreaming, walking out on the marsh. Watching, spying, giggling with Gina, their heads so close she could smell Gina’s gum, her perfume from the chemist’s discount basket. Alison turned back to look at the road.
‘It’s somewhere around here, isn’t it?’ she said, and as Paul flicked his head to examine her she made herself smile back. His car didn’t have satellite navigation, he didn’t even have a smartphone. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘I looked at the website. I think we’re nearly there.’ They approached a junction. ‘Left,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s left.’ He paused, turned. Left.
‘You were right,’ he said, his indicator ticking, and there loomed the two cypresses, sooty-dark in the evening light, and behind them the red-brick and painted gables of the Edwardian roadhouse. There was the big bay window that used to be crowded with hoarded rubbish, the cluttered drive now cleared. The car crunched in on the gravel and a light blinked on in the hotel’s porch.
Stock-still in the car, Alison suddenly remembered a hairless child climbing out of an ambulance, sickness and the first blunt shock; cancer and the incontrovertible fact of death. What had come to the crooked house wasn’t the first horror to be visited on the village, after all. The car felt stifling then, sweat on Alison’s upper lip as if she was on the edge of fever. There was worse, crowding into her head. Her father whistling in his workshop; the twins’ fifth birthday, opening presents in the garden among daffodils; Joe’s arm around her on the beach as his friends teased her.
She climbed out of the car, and smelled the sea. Esme.
Chapter Eight
With her eyes shut Alison would have known where she was, if she’d been blindfolded and walked into the Old Ship on Paul’s arm rather than blinking on the threshold. She shouldn’t have come.
‘We could do room service,’ she’d suggested back at the hotel as they dropped their bags and surveyed the room, and he’d looked at her sideways.
‘Can you imagine what room service is going to be like here?’ he said. The decor was chintzy and suffocating.
‘Some sandwiches and a bottle of wine?’ she pleaded. ‘Aren’t you tired?’
Paul had stepped up to her and put his arms around her, locked them behind her back so she couldn’t move, his face very close. His grey eyes danced, he seemed delighted with something. Being there, being with her? She didn’t know.
‘They’re not here yet,’ he said
gently. ‘Morgan and what’s his name. If that’s what’s on your mind.’
Alison shook her head, marvelling. ‘No,’ she said dully. ‘I’m just tired.’ Tuesday evening. The wedding on Saturday. The week yawned ahead of her, frightening.
‘Ah, come on,’ he said, and his lips brushed hers. ‘Don’t you think this place is rather – extraordinary? Geographically, I mean; the estuary, the feeling of being on the edge of nowhere? Rather interesting.’ He pulled his head back, examining her. ‘Besides, we need to get some air, after all that driving.’ And leaving her no room to respond, he released her abruptly.
The twilight had intensified outside and it was warm. A soft wind rustled in the darkening countryside and Alison pictured reed beds down along the sea wall inland. She had listened to directions from the hotel owner in silence, although she could have walked down there in her sleep.
‘It’s very … authentic,’ the woman had said, making a face when Paul asked about the pub. ‘Basic is another way of putting it.’ She’d told them to call her Jan – she was in her fifties, a groomed, stiff-haired blonde, and had come from another part of the country entirely: the far side of London, a place of clear streams and paddocks and expensive cars. ‘The prices were so good here,’ she confided. Her voice was nasal, carefully enunciated and to Alison’s ears it defined her as an outsider straight away. ‘A place like this, all these original features? I’d never have been able to afford it.’
‘We’ll give it a try, anyway,’ said Paul of the pub, to their hostess. Kindly, because Alison had known instantly the hotel wasn’t the kind of place he liked, even though she’d never been away with him before.
Paul had looked at her, amused, when she stuck her arm tight through his and hung on – she wasn’t a toucher, not in public – but he said nothing. They walked first along the empty unlit road, then past the village sign, a shabby petrol station, a barn, a terrace of houses, a farmhouse, all familiar – she also noted as they passed a small new development here, a conversion there. The estuary was no longer visible, but Alison could smell it and as they got closer she could hear it too, the trickle and gurgle, the slap of halyards ringing on the boats as the wind got up and the tide lifted. They passed the row of tall sail-lofts, silent and unlit, the boatyard, the waterfront with the sea lapping below it. She pointed nothing out, walked past. The yellow glow of the pub windows appeared.
She blinked on the threshold, as if it might transport her somewhere else. The pub smelled the same, or almost. Beer-soaked bar towels, stale steam from the dishwasher: all pubs probably smelled like this but Alison had avoided them, since. At thirteen she’d just begun a job collecting glasses here on Sunday afternoons. It had used to smell of ashtrays too – one of her jobs had been wiping them out, the smell of slops and fag ash had made her gag. Now the smokers were outside among the wooden tables, murmuring by the water, the ends of their cigarettes flaring in the blue dusk.
Mum had only allowed her to do Sunday afternoons: there was homework to be done, had been her excuse, there was her room to tidy. But thirteen-year-old Esme had known it was that her mother wanted to minimise the chances she’d see her dad in there, because he didn’t go in until the evening on a Sunday.
Behind the cramped bar stood the bad-tempered landlord Ron, fatter, jowlier, redder. He gave her a glance as she came in, perhaps he paused a fraction but no more. An old man with a grey beard mumbling to himself on a bar stool, a youngish woman with untidy hair and cracked heels in high sandals as far from him as she could get, running her finger around a tumbler containing dregs. Vodka and tonic. A table of underage drinkers in a corner huddled over pints, would-be surfers with dirty dreadlocks and smelling of dope. The nearest surf would be a hundred miles away, up to Norfolk somewhere. There was a tacked up poster for a barge match on the wall beside the bar; abstractedly Alison registered that the race – between the big old Thames coastal barges whose home the estuary would have been a hundred years earlier – would take place on Friday, the day before the wedding. The matches had been a feature of their years here, a couple every summer, an endless awards ceremony in the pub, heckling and singing and someone ending up in the water. Little boats loaded with drunken men heading back out to their barges moored in the estuary.
The floor was still dusty boards, the tables topped with chipped red melamine, the greasy glass cabinet on the bar holding cheese rolls in clingfilm still advertised a cheap fizzy drink. Funny thing was, in London it might all have been some kind of ironic reference but Alison couldn’t smile. She felt sick.
‘Gin and tonic?’ said Paul. ‘It’s probably safe enough.’
‘Vodka,’ said Alison. She hesitated, located an empty table and sat, her back against the wall. She watched Paul go to the bar, inserting himself between a bar stool and the old man with the beard. Watched him wait for Ron to finish some pointless restacking of crisp boxes, a gesture Alison recognised from out of the past, designed to show them all that the landlord was nobody’s servant.
The old man leaned down on his bar stool, reaching towards Paul as he stood patiently and said something Alison couldn’t hear. Even from the reckless lean of his body she could tell how drunk he was, and how ancient, but Paul turned politely towards him and answered. And then instantly she knew the old man, of course, something about the shabby coat he wore, a heavy tweed stiff with age and dirt, something about the point to his beard and the walnut gleam of his old bald head and there it was, even his name. Stephen Bray, the tilt of his boat on its side out in the marsh, the reek of home brew and unwashed clothes.
Still here? Alison was astonished, but then it occurred to her that those you thought were ancient, at thirteen, perhaps had only been middle-aged. She saw Paul answer politely, saw him nod just faintly in her direction in response and the old man looked over. She pushed her glasses up on her nose and frowned down into the contents of her bag, pretending not to notice them looking her way. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Paul get Ron’s attention at last but Stephen Bray’s hand was on his arm, detaining him.
His boat had always been out on the marsh, out along the shingle path from the waterfront that was buttressed with timbers sunk decades ago into the mud and now rotting. In theory you could make your way from there to the crooked house but it was a maze of creeks and dead ends. A memory came to her, of her father getting in more than once with mud up to his knees, saying he’d been to see Stephen, and had struck out across the marsh afterwards.
The drinks were on the bar now, Ron’s hand not as steady as it had been. Stephen Bray was still talking, up into Paul’s frowning face; now he was trying to pay for the drinks and Paul’s hand was out and up, refusing.
Her father had taken her along to see him on his boat once or twice, when she’d been smaller, when they’d been happier. Their family on an even keel: that was a funny phrase in this place. She remembered clambering down the narrow gangway into the crowded space – it had once been a rich man’s yacht, her father had told her, sixty years before. And still there’d been something fairy-tale about it, even frowsty and cluttered, with the long sweeping curve of the hull inside, the tarnished rails and the narrow shelves stacked with cans and pots, the bunk covered in an ancient army blanket and all of it tilted at forty-five degrees. Her father whispering before they got there, ‘He’s all right,’ and holding her hand tight. ‘He’s just a lonely old man.’
There’d been a bottle he’d fished out from a cupboard that smelled of diesel, a liquid, straw-coloured and viscous, that had made her eyes water just to sniff it. He called it parsnip wine and never at nine or ten having even tasted wine Esme had known no better. He’d got out tiny dusty glasses etched with grapes, one for each of them, and they’d laughed kindly when she spluttered and retched at the single sip she took.
Lonely. Maybe. Paul looked over at her but not in desperation, not yet. He seemed actually interested in what the old man was saying and she felt a tightening in her gut at his kindness, his patience.
&
nbsp; Something wrong with Stephen Bray: her mother had thought that. Eccentric, her father had countered, and what was wrong with that – Kate, dismay in his voice chiding her for her cold heart – but she had given him a warning look. Esme could tell that her mother imagined the two of them huddled over illicit booze, outcasts on the mud, her husband turning into the old hobgoblin’s apprentice, talking to himself and holding his trousers up with string. If only.
What had they talked about? When she’d been there Bray had shown little interest in Esme, mostly talked to her father about the boat, listing races and classes and owners, the wood used in the hull and the decking, oak and spruce, maple from the Balkans. Charts and lists and numbers, he was happy as a kid reciting them. He’d been married once, long ago; she’d heard her father tell her mother that too and Alison could remember even now the sceptical sound her mother had made in reply.
Had she been right? Her mother hadn’t always been cold-hearted, perhaps wasn’t even then, perhaps she had just had to toughen up. When she’d come home from hospital with the twins she’d been a mess but overflowing with joy, in a grubby dressing gown all day, crying one minute, grabbing Esme the next, wrapping her arms around her. A sweet smell on her, milk and sleeplessness and sweat, nappies and bloodstained pads all over the place. Joe disgusted and laughing, too much mess, too much chaos, too much joy. It had to end.
There was a clatter of laughter from the surfer-boys’ table that turned the old man’s head and she saw Paul finally, almost regretfully, slide from the stool where he’d settled, and lift the drinks from the bar. The dishevelled woman was waggling her empty glass at Ron but at the same time turned to follow Paul’s progress, and on instinct Alison shifted, out of her line of sight. Paul lowered the glasses.
That night, she thought, a small shock. That cool June night when her world ended. The last person who saw him, who saw my dad off at the back door of the pub, was that old man. Stephen Bray.
The Crooked House Page 5