by F. G. Cottam
‘The refurbishment has been done recently,’ he said.
Richard shrugged. ‘The salt air is unforgiving. Properties are well maintained or go into decline very quickly. It’s just a question of looking after one’s investments.’
It was odd to hear the language of an estate agent coming out of the mouth of a man with what James thought of as Penmarrick’s slightly debauched, rock’n’roll air. But he had to admit to himself that Topper’s Reach was very handsomely appointed. It was better than that, he thought, it was perfect.
‘Who lived here?’
‘Well, a few people have, over the years. The house has been here for better than a century, after all. It was built in Edwardian times. Its first resident was Adam Gleason, our ardent hero of the Western Front.’
James thought Richard’s tone, for the first time, slightly sarcastic. But he let it go.
‘Gleason lived here with his young wife and baby daughter. Of course the daughter never really got to know her father. He was cut down by the beastly Hun, hit by a volley of rifle fire in no-man’s-land when she was about four years old. Still, I suppose she had the poetry to console her.’
‘Shouldn’t there be a plaque on the wall?’
‘Probably there should. And if we got more tourists than we do, undoubtedly there would be. That said, Gleason has his high street monument. And he is on the county’s A-level English curriculum. It’s consolation enough.’
James looked around the spacious room they were in. Its walls were smooth and white. The oak boards of the wooden floor smelled recently oiled. Light bathed them in two lambent beams through a pair of large east-facing windows. They were mirrored by two facing west and he walked across to one of these and looked out at the view. The elevation made it unobstructed. Sea and sky stretched out before him to infinity. This would be their sitting room. They would be happy here. Better, they would be safe and therefore carefree.
‘Lillian will have to see it,’ he said.
‘Of course she will.’
‘And you have not yet told me the asking price.’
‘There is that to discuss.’
‘But speaking for myself, Richard, I do not see how it could be bettered.’
Lillian Greer barely kept it together on what she already knew was the most abject day of her life. What made it so awful was that it could easily be only the precursor to a period even more bleak and despairing. She could lose her family. Even that wasn’t the worst of it: the truth was she could have cost herself her family. Losing something was a passive and often blameless misfortune. She had been neither passive nor blameless in what she had done. At the very least of it, if nothing further occurred as a consequence of her actions, she had robbed her son of his innocence. She had disillusioned him.
Everything was recognisable and all of it was alien. She toured Hampton Court Palace with Jack, familiar with every room, every avenue of the ornamental gardens and each blind turn of the famous maze. Her surroundings were entirely faithful to her memory of them. How could it be otherwise in a place so rich in history it was almost sacred to those trusted to care for it? It was she who was different. She had been a confident girl and had grown into a confident woman. Now she was unsure of herself. She did not feel remotely in control of her own destiny. She thought the only thing that could have been worse was discovering one of her children had a serious illness with an uncertain prognosis.
Her recent vigil shared with Olivia, waiting for word from James at the hospital about Jack’s condition after the attack, had given her a brief preview of how that might feel. She had not enjoyed it. She had taken what comfort she could at the time in the knowledge that his father was at her son’s bedside and that nobody loved him more or could take better care of his parental needs.
They ate outside at the Tiltyard Café. Birds were tame and even bold, picking scraps from tables recently vacated and yet to have their debris cleared. Children climbed trees on the landscaped green beyond the flagged area where the tables were set. Sunlight bathed them. Jack toyed with a beef and veal pie made to a recipe five hundred years old and served with French fries. Lillian pushed a salad through the oil and vinegar making a streaked, rainbow pattern on the white surface of her plate.
Knights strapped into full armour had mounted their priceless war horses and jousted for sport on this very ground centuries earlier. They had done so on summer days such as this. They would have smelled the same smells of cut grass and fresh June blooms from their saddles. Time passed. It was life’s great and enduring truism. Time passed. Lillian wondered if it also forgave.
She bought Jack an ice cream from the hut on the south side of Hampton Court Bridge and they walked along the towpath for a while. They walked in silence. Jack at least ate his ice cream and the chocolate flake stuck into it. They left the human traffic behind them as they progressed along the towpath and their surroundings became quieter and more remote. The odd boat idled through the somnolent water. Lazy wakes rippled against the bank they walked along. Jack stopped when he saw a bird standing in the shallow water a few feet from the bank, watching them.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a heron,’ Lillian said.
‘It’s huge.’
‘They are huge.’ And they were also a symbol of bad luck. She tried to remember why. Then she did. It was because they searched out shallow water. They signalled to your enemies where the river could be forded and your defences thereby breached.
Alarmed by them, the heron took flight. ‘Blimey,’ Jack said, awed, his mother supposed, by its wingspan.
‘Will you tell your father?’
‘No.’
‘Why won’t you?’
‘It isn’t my place to do so, Mum. Will you tell him?’
‘Yes. I will. Secrets are corrosive. That means they eat away at you.’
‘I know what corrosive means.’
‘I will have to tell him.’
‘It will break his heart.’
‘I know. I know it will.’
They paused there on the towpath at the riverside in silence for a moment. To her right, over the ragged border of treetops, Lillian could see the gilded spires of the palace glittering golden in the sun. She remembered how she had felt walking its rooms and corridors and the gloomy labyrinth of its Tudor kitchen complex an hour earlier. It had all felt familiar and yet alien; as though she wore someone else’s skin and perception.
Suddenly she understood how she might have forgotten the Brodmaw Bay illustrations she had apparently done almost two decades earlier. She had thought, in her complacent way, that her mind was a citadel made impregnable by mental strength and confidence. She no longer thought that was so. She now thought it quite possible that back then she had endured some kind of breakdown. It seemed to her entirely plausible, in this new mood of vulnerability, made humble.
‘I love you, Mum,’ Jack said.
The mask had slipped. The humility and doubt and sorrow had shown on her face and her son had seen it. He came to her and put his arms around her and they held each other and she was aware of the surprising size and strength of him.
‘It will all be all right,’ he said.
‘We’ll go away,’ she said. She kissed him and stroked his cheek. ‘We’ll make a fresh start somewhere new by the sea and we’ll be locked on, Jack, all of us, I promise you.’
During his medical training Robert O’Brien had always scored highly in any test measuring diagnostic skills. He was pretty confident, therefore, that he knew exactly what was wrong with him. Many modern ailments were both a consequence and a reflection of the complexity of the modern world. No species was so adaptable to change as the human being had proven to be. But the pace of change was so fast that it inevitably took its toll on individuals from time to time.
He was necessarily honest with himself and admitted that a part of it was cocaine psychosis. He had been introduced to a very good dealer six months earlier at a Soho reception held by a film prod
ucer contact. This bloke’s stuff had not been trodden all over. It was Bolivian product and about 80 per cent pure. Ever since this introduction, his consumption had steadily risen. By any standards, he had been caning the stuff.
Part of it was the trauma caused by Lillian’s recent behaviour. He had invested a lot in that woman emotionally. The relationship had been clandestine, which was not ideal. But apart from that, it had been as satisfying as any he had ever enjoyed. It had been close to perfect and he had looked forward to having her entirely to himself once she divorced the tedious loser she had got herself hitched to in the long-ago time before her worldly success.
Now she wanted out. Or apparently, she wanted out. Robert did not entirely believe it. He thought that she might be playing some game of womanly politics, engaged in a double bluff to test the strength of his commitment. But whatever the motive and whatever the truth, her behaviour had shocked and upset him to his core.
The third influential factor was exhaustion, caused by overwork and no doubt exacerbated by the coke, which he had been guilty of using not just for pleasure but to combat tiredness. Hollywood loved a franchise. The major studios did not want to invest in a single, one-off movie. They wanted what the Harry Potter series had done and the Narnia films had signally failed to. They wanted the cost of building two or three sets and assembling an ensemble cast they could use repeatedly. They wanted the solid box-office return projections they could make for each sequel on the basis of the previous instalment in the series.
They loved the character of Kate Riordan, his spunky County Clare serving girl with the secret, telekinetic gift. They loved her underdog ethnicity and the Cinderella quality of her lowly social status. But they craved more stories and he had been under enormous pressure to produce plots that were cinematic enough to please them. He had been working very long hours, for many weeks, with a great deal at stake, always with the worry that one morning he might wake up and switch on his laptop and poise over the keyboard with the ideas and the words that followed them simply refusing to come.
Writer’s block happened. It had happened to writers he knew. Their fertile minds and vivid imaginations had suddenly dried up. As one of them had said to him at a children’s fiction conference, I rubbed its polished side one day and the genie had vacated the lamp. Didn’t leave a note, Robert, never even paused to say goodbye. It could happen to anyone. He dreaded that fate, suddenly and randomly afflicting him.
Drug abuse, emotional trauma and exhaustion had combined to affect his mind. They had not affected his judgement, he did not think. And he thought that his behaviour, most of the time, was still rational and therefore normal. Turning up at Lillian’s house with the flowers the previous day had been rash. But it had not exactly been the insane act of a stalker, had it? It had been spontaneous and driven by honest passion. And anyway, he had got away with it. The boy had taken him for a courier. Lillian had acted indignant, but in retrospect he thought had to have been secretly flattered by the extravagance of the bouquet.
He knew the causes of the hallucinations he was suffering. He even knew their inspiration. But rationalising them did not guarantee putting an end to them and the latest, the one last night, had really frightened him.
He had seen the little girl first in the wing mirror of his motorbike. She had been standing on the pavement behind him in sunshine in her purple and grey school uniform and he had registered how pale her face had looked. He saw her again, standing over the road, preternaturally pale and still, he thought, as he waited for Lillian to answer the door to him outside that handsome Bermondsey townhouse.
He had thought little if anything of this, until seeing her the previous night, standing at the end of his bed, when her curious scrutiny or perhaps the coldness she delivered to the room awoke him in the small hours. She had worn a frown across her wan features. Her stare had been intent. And there had been something poised and hostile about her posture that had chilled him, as he lay there, to the bone. Had she spoken, had words emerged from her mouth, he thought he might have screamed.
Robert recalled this, sitting outside a Soho café, drinking a double espresso at a pavement table as people paraded by and taxis and delivery vans levered their laborious way along the too-narrow street. He resolved to lay off the coke. He resolved to do what he could to work shorter hours and less intently than he had over recent weeks. He would get more sleep. He wondered if he should take up racket ball or squash. Competitive sport, when it was physically arduous, could provide stress relief and he would need the endorphins, weaning himself off the marching powder and the buoyant hit it provided.
His emotional state was a trickier problem to tackle but the face-to-face meeting with the flowers had left him feeling more optimistic than the phone call dumping him had. Anyway, he believed in the old Irish saying that a faint heart never won a fair maiden.
He knew what the source of the apparition was. His own creativity had inspired her, hadn’t it? He was in a sense to blame for her. She was Kate Riordan, wasn’t she? He had not pictured her in his mind looking quite so pale and had not knowingly resolved that quaint and pretty school uniform she wore. But the subconscious was a strange imperative and it did not do to examine it in detail too intense. You rubbed the lamp, as his poor past acquaintance and rival had said. You hoped the genie responded. You did not lift the lamp lid to see exactly how he lived.
It was ironic, to be scared of his own creation. But the hallucinations were a serious warning that he had to get a grip. He had to make some fairly profound lifestyle changes and he had to make them right away. Most importantly, he had to resolve the situation with Lillian. He needed to know exactly where he stood. He deserved to know exactly where he stood. He was prepared to accommodate her children, if that was what it took. Perhaps that was the cause of her concern, now that things had become so serious between them. Perhaps it had become a case, for her, of where do we go from here?
Almost certainly that was it. And it was not a problem at all, because he would be happy to provide her with all the assurance she needed. He was totally in love, totally committed, totally confident that they could and would be blissfully happy together.
He had sat alone outside the café. But when he looked up, through the ripple of heat shimmer at his reflection in a showroom window over the road, he saw that he shared his zinc table with a little girl, fleeting in purple and grey, blonde under the straw hat, swinging her legs back and forth playfully under her chair, staring intently at him and then concealed by a passing van and then when the van had passed, no longer there at all.
After his viewing with Richard Penmarrick of the house on Topper’s Reach, James thanked him and they parted with a handshake. Then he went to a high street tea room where he drank a cup of coffee and looked at the photographs he had taken of the property on his mobile phone. They did not do it justice. He had seen some lovely photo essays in Coast magazine of houses occupying similar locations. But he thought the charms of the place he had just toured singular and potent and perhaps even unique.
The asking price was four hundred thousand pounds. It was not possible, Richard had told him, to buy the freehold. The four hundred grand was the price of a ninety-nine-year lease. James did some calculations on the back of an envelope at his café table. They owned their Bermondsey house outright. They would qualify for tax relief on a mortgage on the second property. It would not be quite true to say that the deal would finance itself. But they could certainly afford to move without selling up. Anyway, they could rent the Bermondsey house for twice what the monthly mortgage payments on Topper’s Reach would likely be.
He tried to send Lillian the pictures, but could not get a signal on his phone. He went back to the Leeward and retrieved his shorts and a towel from his room intent on a swim in the sea. The weather was fine, the water relatively calm and he had already established from Charlie Abraham the limits of the bathing-friendly area of the beach. There were no treacherous undertows or strong currents. The
area was marked by bright orange buoys.
James swam in the sea for an hour. He had no fear of deep water or of the predatory monsters with fins the tabloid press insisted lurked ready to eat Cornish bathers. He was imaginative only when he chose to be, in the creation and development of his epic game. He was not by nature fanciful. The fact of his having seen a schoolgirl two days before in the livery of a school that had closed fifty years ago was more than intriguing, it was bloody odd. Penmarrick’s revelation about St Anselm’s had chilled him the previous evening, when it had made the hair bristle on his forearms and his skin prickle momentarily with cold.
There was a plausible explanation. There had to be, because the girl had been real. The sight of the little apparition troubled him. But the explanation would not likely be made more forthcoming by dwelling on the mystery. He could not and would not forget about it. The pragmatic thing to do, though, was to put it to the back of his mind.
When he got back to the beach and the pile of clothing and other stuff he had left above the high-water mark, he had a strong phone signal and had received a call. There was no message but the number was that of DS McCabe’s mobile. James dried himself and dressed and then called him.
‘Not good news I’m afraid, Mr Greer.’
‘I’m a big boy, Detective Sergeant.’
‘A conviction is looking less and less likely. The perpetrators were a fifteen-year-old ringleader and his cousins who were twins of thirteen. The fifteen-year-old is the one using the tyre iron in the CCTV footage we’ve got. There is legitimate doubt about his fitness to stand trial.’
‘Go on.’
‘He was involuntarily incarcerated in a Kent mental institution after being given a psychiatric assessment by the immigration service. His mother engaged a civil rights lawyer from Canterbury who ended up getting him out. He’s been in and out of various psychiatric facilities ever since. Lewisham had him put in one after an assault on a teaching assistant at the special school he was attending there. The family were housed by Southwark, whose social services subsequently engineered his release. Are you keeping up?’