by Tin Larrick
“Sorry about that,” he said, not taking his eyes from the forest. “Suddenly needed a smoke. Emotions can do your legs, can’t they?”
He placed the white-filtered cigarette in his mouth and produced a white-and-green pack from his pocket. He offered it to her. She declined with a polite wave of the hand, but not without a moment’s hesitation.
Jamie noticed this.
“At least you thought about it,” he said. “I’m sure most people would refuse anything offered by someone like me on principle.”
Someone like me? What did he mean?
“The cherry blossom was bad enough, but that bloody forest creeped me out like you wouldn’t believe. It was the one thing I wasn’t sorry to leave.”
She made herself look down at the forest, and hugged herself.
“You don’t like it either, eh? Can’t blame you. There’s only about two hundred yards of it from up here down to the road, but you can’t hear a single whisper of traffic.”
He dropped the cigarette and trampled it into the concrete. She watched it go, this minor transgression of politeness somehow transfixing her. He toed the flagstones until the butt had completely disintegrated, and then continued rubbing it with the ball of his foot, for at least five seconds longer than necessary, like a bull preparing to charge.
When he looked up, his eyes and nose were red. He seemed to be on the cusp of tears.
“I ought to be going now. Thank you for your time, Mrs Rowntree.”
He walked past her into the house. She followed him in, unable to say anything.
He nodded at the half-empty bottle of rosé on the coffee table as he entered.
“Slippery slope, that,” he said with a smile.
“It’s… it’s from last night,” she said.
He didn’t say anything, but traced a finger down the glass, smearing the condensation that suggested it was anything but.
“I’m very sorry for the intrusion,” he said in the hallway. “Thank you very much for indulging my trip down memory lane.”
He shook her hand briefly, and then opened the front door. He bent down to retrieve his duffle bag, and hoisted it with a grunt onto his back.
“Goodbye, Mrs Rowntree,” he said, and turned to go.
As he walked off up the path – not giving the cherry blossom a second look – she saw the tattoo on the back of his neck again.
A tattoo of a small fleur-de-lis.
*
Sean arrived home late, which infuriated her.
She had spent the afternoon in a kind of catatonic reflective state, replaying the – frankly surreal – episode over and over in her mind. Two of her closest friends – at least, friends in whom she might confide such an encounter – were either constantly distracted by the demands of an eight month-old son or trying to escape an abusive marriage. Since the child's birth Charlotte had continually hoped to have reason to join her – at the nursery, at the park. at the ball pit – with her own addition to the family; as it stood, they were a gradually diverging trifecta, borne of their different circumstances.
So, she ruminated somewhat glumly, her only real sounding board was Sean, but so vexed was she when he finally ventured home that she kept the episode from him. He obviously sensed something was wrong, but she rewarded him only with a sulk. She had no doubt that his reason for being late was legitimate – such were the unspoken expectations of trainee lawyers – but that did not allay her mood.
Instead, she went to bed early. She took the pack of cards with her, but deliberately avoided the rather attractive-looking bottle of Bordeaux sitting in the rack atop the fridge – the earlier insinuation of Jamie's finger down the cold bottle was still loud in her memory.
Among, it had to be said, a carousel of other questions surrounding the mystery of the stranger on her doorstep. She regarded the empty space below the street lamp through the window, and then pulled the curtains. She sat in bed, the pinkish glow of the bedside lamp creating a narrow halo in her corner of the room, and turned the cards over, the questions spinning through her mind. Eventually, her pragmatic outlook distilled the bemusement into another simple question: yes it was an unusual encounter, but why should it play on her mind so? It was over.
Wasn't it?
*
The following day, the silence weighed heavily on her mind. Sean's late finish had morphed into an early start; he was gone by the time Charlotte awoke, but her mood was buoyed a little by a post-it note he left her on the fridge. In a silent retort to the insinuations of the stranger, she moved the bottle of Bordeaux from the rack to the kitchen table, and stuck Sean's note to the neck.
Charlotte castigated herself at the disappointment she felt at there being no knock on the door during the morning, and then again at the thrill that passed through her when that slow, heavy knock came again at a little after two that afternoon.
He stood there, still with the duffle bag, still with the denim jacket, and still looking like he hadn't been near a bath or a change of clothes.
"Hello, Jamie," she said.
"I want to buy it," he said. "Your house."
"I'm sorry?" Charlotte said, feeling the arcane smile drop from her face.
"I want to buy your house. I'm sorry – I didn't sleep a wink. I'm haunted by memories."
Memories of what?
"You wouldn't believe what's going on in my head. I feel like I've met up with an old girlfriend I haven't seen in twenty years. It's driving me nuts. I have to move back in."
"Jamie..."
"Your husband – whatsisname? Sean? He's a solicitor. He could sort out the paperwork."
"Jamie... I'm sorry. It's not for sale."
His face seemed to seize up, and the corners of his mouth turned downwards.
"We've only just moved in," she said, somehow compelled to fill the silence. "And besides, I love this house. I really do."
He laughed. Scoffed, rather.
"What do you love? You're scared shitless. Scared of that forest. Scared of the tree. Scared of the emptiness and the silence that fills the place during the day. Once you've unpacked everything and finished fucking about with wallpaper and paint, you'll start all over again, just to keep the silence at the door. You don't actually think you'll be able to have a child here, do you?"
"What? I..." The swear words had made her recoil.
"Trust me, I know. Don’t bring a baby into this house. No child can be happy here. YOU can't be happy here. Sell it to me."
Charlotte found her tongue.
"How dare you? Who are you to come round to my house and make those kind of insinuations? After I invited you in? I don't even know you. I'm sorry if you are troubled by whatever happened here, but it's legally my house, and it isn't for sale. Now please leave, or I'll call the police."
He had lit a cigarette while she had been speaking, and he shook the match out and dropped it in the flowerbed before he spoke.
"You have no idea what happened here,” he said, the cigarette bouncing between his lips. “If you did, you'd be begging me to buy it from you.”
Charlotte opened her mouth, but no words formed in her brain.
“Sell it to me. I’ll give you one week.”
Jamie Brazill turned on his heel and walked off up the path.
*
If the rough charm of the previous day had instilled a kind of romantic inertia in Charlotte, then its absence galvanised her into reproachful action.
She called the firm first of all, but Sean was out. Charlotte went to hang up, but then asked for Richard instead. There was a moment’s hiatus while the secretary patched numbers and connected calls, and then he picked up.
“Charlotte? Is everything alright?” His tone was that of concern, but it was excessive attentiveness that had fooled her the last time. She wasn’t going to fall for that again, and besides, her needs this time were purely practical.
“Yes, I’m fine. Richard, I need you to do something for me. I don’t want you to mention it to Sean
, either.”
There was a moment’s silence on the line.
“Charlotte, I’m flattered, but…”
“Don’t go getting any ideas, Richard. That was a one-off. A mistake.”
“Ouch.”
“Don’t pull that on me. Besides, I’m married now. I’m talking about the house.”
“The house?”
“Yes. When you handled the conveyance, do you remember any previous title deeds in the name of Brazill?”
“Brazill? One ‘L’ or two?”
“Two. I think.”
“I don’t think so. The woman you bought the house from was called Hawthorne. If you mean before that…”
“I do.”
“…then I need to do some digging.”
“Do it. Please.”
“Okay. I need a day or two.”
“Fine. I also need you to find out whether the electoral register has been updated to ‘Rowntree’ yet.”
“Charlotte, what’s this about?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
She hung up the phone and went into the drawing room, where she switched on her laptop.
She put ‘Jamie Brazill’ into Google and hit ‘Enter.’ The first page of results did not return anything particularly salient, but then so sudden had been the intrusion that she only had the stranger’s word that he’d used his real name.
She added ‘Eastbourne’ and ‘Ratton’ into the search bar.
Her mobile phone rang; for some reason, she found this considerably less intrusive than the clang of the landline phone out on the hall table with its infernal overflowing plant. It was like being returned to the present.
A photo of Sean’s beaming, snow-cold face, taken during a skiing holiday in the Alps, appeared on the display.
“Hello?”
“Hon? It’s me. I’m going to be late, I’m afraid…”
“This is news?” she said, slicing across his bows.
“Don’t be like that. Some idiot has slashed my tyres.”
Charlotte stood up, a shrill cold spreading through her chest.
“What?”
“Yeah, all four of them.”
“Did… did you call the police?”
“There’s nothing they can do. It was parked out the back of the office, in the yard. There’s no CCTV there, and it’s so tucked away that there won’t be any witnesses. Plus I have no idea when it happened – it’s been out there all day. It’s strange, though. No-one else’s car was touched.”
Oh, shit.
“So I’ve called the garage, and they’re coming out with some replacements, but they’ll be at least an hour.”
“Sean… why would someone do this?”
“You tell me, honey. See you later.”
He ended the call.
Charlotte sat on the edge of the sagging sofa, her fingers pressed against her scalp, her thumbs on her cheekbones, hideous feelings of intrusion and instability and guilt and fear all compressed into a locked cylinder within her.
It seemed slightly disingenuous to ask Sean why someone would slash his tyres when she probably had a better idea than he, but it was the kind of thing a wife would ask. Besides, he had totally failed to notice that such a question was entirely rhetorical, designed to elicit reassurance from the protector. As a consequence, his equally colloquial reply had been unwittingly loaded with accusatory meaning.
You tell me.
She suddenly could not stand to be in the house. She grabbed her coat and car keys and left, not bothering to check whether the heavy front door had clicked locked behind her.
She walked up the path under the bare cherry blossom – it already seemed unlikely that she would be here long enough to see it bear fruit – and walked to her little red Mercedes on the driveway.
As with many sports cars, it was designed to be low to the ground. Today, however, it was six inches closer to the ground than usual, because each tyre was completely flat, a black gash grinning at Charlotte from the middle of each one.
*
Richard called her mobile about an hour later.
“Hello?”
“Charlotte? It’s Richard. I tried the landline, but...”
“I’m out.”
“Okay. I’ve managed to dig out some of the title information on your house.”
“Okay.”
“Well, you bought the house from Hawthorne. She lived there for three years. Before that it was Sadat. They were there for two. Gooch before that; eight months only. If you want me to go further back than that I’ll have to start dusting off some archived stuff. No Brazill, though.”
“No one’s been there very long, have they?”
“No, I thought that myself. Not that that’s indicative of anything, but then you haven’t told me what this is about.”
“I don’t even know myself.”
“Charlotte… are you all right? You don’t sound very well.”
“I’m… I’m a bit cold.”
“Where are you?”
Charlotte clicked the red ‘end call’ button on her mobile, and Richard’s voice was gone.
There wasn’t even a fence separating the bottom of the garden from the forest, just a curled-over strip of rusted chicken wire that had been trampled down over the years. It was funny, thought Charlotte, that such an afterthought of a boundary marker could well prove legally definitive in any property dispute.
Maybe that’s what it was, she thought. A property dispute. Some ancient argument, buried under weight of generations past, that Jamie Brazill had come back to reclaim. Maybe the answer lay out there in the forest.
From the foot of the garden, the opaque density of the forest was less, but not by much; the thick shroud of darkness just started a bit further in. There was no path, no pruned fronds, nothing to suggest the comforts of any kind of human intervention. He’d been right, though, she thought. You couldn’t hear the traffic, but you knew it was there. Sound, light – it all failed to penetrate.
This was the first time she had ventured this far down the garden, and it had less to do with conquering her fear than it did some desperate necessity.
What was out here?
What had caused his eyes to mist?
It suddenly occurred to her that her online research, borne of some desperate urge to avoid being in the house alone, had stalled. She really ought to finish it.
She turned around, and screamed.
Sean was standing there.
Just Sean.
“You bastard!” she screamed, thumping her chest with her small fists. “You frightened me half to death!”
He said nothing, but wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him in a fierce embrace to stifle her blows, and she crumbled into a coil of shaking tears in his arms.
“Charlotte… what the hell is going on?” he said when she had regained some of her composure. “I saw the Mazda.”
“We’d better go inside,” she said. “I need to tell you about my weird fucking week.”
*
Sean was, needless to say, incredulous. Incredulous that his wife had invited a total stranger into their new house, incredulous that the wine rack above the fridge seemed to be dwindling by the day, incredulous that Charlotte had, in the early days of their relationship, indulged in a brief and ill-advised fling with one of the partners at Sean’s firm.
This last point had somehow chattered out while Charlotte was detailing her amateur attempts to investigate Jamie Brazill’s background. She has not explicitly stated it, but Sean had drawn the – correct – inference by piecing together omissions, evasions, and Charlotte’s silent responses to one or two pointed questions.
The admission-by-silence obviously overshadowed the main thrust of Charlotte’s disclosure; having angrily pressed her for details, he then stormed out of the house in a rage, determined to confront his philandering colleague.
Caught up in the bitterness of the moment, Charlotte had gone to the front door and yelled at her
husband as he strode off under the cherry blossom:
“Oh, you’re going to go punch his lights out? He lives in Jevington, Sean, and we don’t have a single good tyre between us!”
“Yeah, you know where he lives, eh?” Sean had yelled back over his shoulder as he stomped off down Parkway.
The winter silence was heavy after the shouting, and she noticed the diminutive figure of an elderly woman across the road, watching Charlotte from her front window with a look of naked disapproval.
In her frustration and upset Charlotte felt briefly tempted to flip the bird at the neighbour she’d never met, but this urge was usurped by a horrible sinking feeling that whatever hopes and dreams she’d had when moving in – God, was it only a month ago? – had already vanished for good.
Her mobile rang as soon as she closed the front door, which she was oddly thankful for. Another moment in that silent house would surely drive her mad, and besides, one can hardly crack on with the housework when one’s world is just starting to crumble.
However, when she heard Richard’s voice, she wished she hadn’t answered it.
“Richard… I’m sorry. Sean knows about us.”
“He what? After all this time? How?...”
“I didn’t tell him. I told him about Jamie, and that I phoned you. He may have rather leapt to his conclusions, but unfortunately they weren’t wrong. He’s on his way to yours now.”
“For Christ’s sake…”
“Don’t worry. He stropped off out of here like a man on a mission, but he’s not walking to Jevington. He’ll come back once he gets to the bottom of Parkway. I just… I just don’t know how all this can have happened.”
“All what? Charlotte, you need to back up and tell me what happened.”
She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply through her nose.
“Okay, okay. Richard, earlier in the week there was a man watching the house. Sean chased him away but he came back the next day when I was alone.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No, nothing like that. He was quite sweet, really. To begin with, anyway. He said he used to live here when he was a boy, and hadn’t been back in years.”
“This is this guy Brazill?”
“Yes.”