Living in the Past

by Jane Lovering

  He squinted his eyes at the canvas ceiling. Tessa. Older student, tall, corkscrew hair, bit shy. That was honestly the best he could do. Not one of Richard’s students, but up on holiday, expanding her experience, getting away from home. He tossed about again, the metal frame of the bed jabbing in his back like a guilty conscience, and finally flung the sleeping bag clear and stood up.

  The camp was quiet, in a pre-dawn way, occasional coughs and murmurs from tents, the odd stray student wandering back from a sojourn in another tent or a visit to the Portaloo; the air hung low and cool and now and again a splatter of rain swept through. It smelled of wet plastic, of heather flowering grimly into the non-existent summer with its teeth clenched, soaked boots, mud, with a faint background trace of the almost chemical scent of the beck running at the bottom of the valley. Duncan felt his shoulders relax a fraction, almost unwillingly, as he raised the tent flap and looked out over the site. His site. A place he’d pushed to be allowed to dig, got the permissions and the paperwork to prove it, a place he’d known since he was a child. The view over the little dale to the rising hump of barrow on the hill opposite, outlined against the lightening sky like a simplistic cameo of a moorland sunrise, so familiar as to be almost etched on his soul.

  He dragged his coat on over the jeans and sweatshirt he’d slept in, wiggled his feet into the unreceptive chill of a pair of rubber boots and went out. He walked down the hillside and across onto the site, where flappy plastic was keeping the rain showers from soaking the trenches.

  He heard the voice before he saw where it was coming from. A steady babble of monologue, rising and falling as though asking questions, with long pauses. The occasional epithet and the sound of rock scrabbling as the questioner presumably slipped on the loose scree and wet grass, and then the monologue again. And then, as the sky began to lighten and the lead grey of wet night gave way to a slightly more optimistic shade of dawn, Duncan saw who was talking.

  It was Grace, long curly hair reacting with the damp environment to give rise to a cloud around her head, wearing a loose pair of jog bottoms under a blue cagoule, which bulged in a way that indicated she’d got most of her wardrobe on underneath it. She was walking along beside the beck, heading back towards the camp, and talking to herself in an unselfconscious way.

  ‘… but I’m really enjoying it. Missing you, though. Oh, it’s starting to get light now, that lovely silvery kind of light that you liked …’

  Duncan debated his options. He could pretend never to have been here, try to sneak back to his tent and let her carry on soliloquying her way along the valley. Or he could make himself known, but let her assume that he hadn’t heard her. Or he could just …

  ‘Good morning.’

  She jumped, skidded and gasped, with her arms flailing, and finally slid backwards down the slope, coming to rest in the beck, up to the tops of her boots in the water. There was a momentary silence, broken only by the ‘bottle-filling’ sound of water rushing into wellingtons.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ she finally asked.

  He could only assume that the air of dignity she’d taken on was for his benefit; she actually looked rather amusing, in a sad sort of way, with the beck diverting itself around her knees in a kind of watery shrug.

  ‘Well, I thought good morning was an acceptable greeting, since it is practically morning. Although, at a guess, I’d say its goodness was somewhat of a moot point right now.’ Duncan decided to go along with her. Pretend that being up to your knees in peaty water was a perfectly normal way to begin a day.

  Grace looked down at herself. ‘You made me jump,’ she said.

  ‘Clearly not high enough. Would you like a hand?’ He approached the water’s edge and held out an arm. Amusement was rising inside him, but he kept it stifled; someone who has been walking in the dark and talking to themselves, he reasoned, is not somebody who is going to welcome being laughed at, however warranted the situation. Besides, he thought, as she reluctantly caught hold of his hand, it wasn’t that funny. And her hand was cold.

  ‘Thank you. Oh God, I’m squelching, that’s not good.’

  Mist clouds of midges had begun to descend now, circling around her head as she bent to check the water level in her footwear. It gave her an ethereal air, Duncan thought; in this half-light, she looked almost elven, as though the gnats were her faery accomplices, a fey company out to greet the dawn.

  ‘Ow! These bloody buggers are biting my ears!’

  All right, maybe not that fey. He pulled at her arm and she winched slowly upwards out of the water.

  ‘Ah. Venus rising,’ he said, feeling that a gallant statement was called for about now. There was a tight pull of embarrassment around the back of his neck, but he wasn’t really sure why, other than that he had absolutely no idea of what to do now.

  Grace flapped her spare hand around her head. ‘Aren’t they biting you? Why aren’t they biting you? Are you some kind of mutant?’

  Duncan let go of her chilly hand. ‘Yes, I’m a mutant. I am the kind of mutant that has “putting on insect repellent” powers.’ He gave her a sidelong glance, hoping she wasn’t thinking he was being glib. He didn’t feel glib, but he was used to people reacting to his words rather than the way he used them, then thinking that he was a socially unaware idiot. Unless – and the thought was new, and made the skin at the top of his spine crawl – he actually was a socially unaware idiot. ‘You were out walking early.’ Yep, let’s state the obvious and hope that does the trick.

  He saw the fight go out of her. All the bossy attitude she’d had, all the argumentativeness just seemed to drain away, dissipating like the water that cascaded over the tops of her boots into the boggy ground, and her shoulders dropped forward.

  ‘I was talking to my husband.’ A defiant rise to her head. ‘He died two years ago.’

  In a sudden moment of clarity, Duncan saw. The signs had been there, her reluctance to eat and the ironed clothes, but he’d taken it as having control issues. Mentally he gave himself a good kicking for his superficiality. He, of all people, should have seen underneath the ‘clouded’ look in her eyes, the lines beside her mouth that she was surely too young for. That air of being awkward because it kept unwanted questions at bay. That feeling of needing to keep the channels open, to ask questions – why did you go and leave me?

  ‘Ah,’ was all he could manage.

  ‘I’m not mad.’

  ‘Never said you were.’

  ‘Oh.’ Pause. Then, ‘My socks are wet.’

  Duncan looked around, up behind them at the camp, still asleep on the hill. ‘Look. My tent is just up there, I’ll lend you some dry socks.’

  She stood for a moment, feet making little squishy noises; presumably she was wriggling her toes inside her boots. Little wisps of her hair blew around and Duncan fought hard against the urge to tidy them away. Inappropriate contact with a vulnerable adult – wow, now I’ve even got the jargon down, that’s unsettling.

  ‘It stops him feeling so far away.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘Talking to Jamie.’ Then her eyes raised up from her toes. ‘Why, did you think I meant having wet socks?’

  ‘No, of course not. It’s just that your train of thought hadn’t stopped at my particular station.’ The return of her snippy tone made him start to feel better. Stopped that sensation that he’d made some horrible faux pas without realising it. ‘Come on. Let’s sort out the sock thing, anything else is completely outside my brief, but I can at least make sure you’ve got dry feet.’

  And now she smiled. A lovely light came into her eyes which, he now realised, were a kind of blue-grey, not unlike the morning that was unfurling around them. With her dark hair it gave her a Celtic look, one he could almost imagine as being at home among the barrows and silvery birch clumps of the moorland here.

  ‘I’m sorry.
Thank you, dry socks sound very nice actually.’

  Duncan led the way. He didn’t need to turn around to know she was following, the sound of a pair of wet wellingtons going uphill was enough. Does she think I was chatting her up? Hey, even I wouldn’t use the ‘borrow a pair of socks’ line. Line? Socks isn’t a line, how can it be? I may be overthinking this …

  Chapter Eight

  Duncan turned out a pair of huge, hairy socks that gave me ‘old man’ feet, but were warm and welcome after the unearthly chill of my wet boots, and I borrowed a pair of slip on trainers to flap my way to my own tent. Tabs was still asleep when I got there, so I sat on my sleeping mat and ate a rogue Kit Kat that I’d had in my bag, whilst scratching the mozzie bites on my neck and ears.

  After a few minutes I got over myself. So, someone had caught me having a ‘chat’ with Jamie, so what? Actually, Duncan had been quite nice about it really, even if he had made me jump so hard that I’d slid backwards into the river. I put my face onto my knees. There was a heat of embarrassment in my cheeks that warmed my legs down as far as the new socks. Not, it must be said, my finest moment in the face of male attention, although, I had managed to trap Jamie’s fingers in a car door when we first met, so I definitely had form for that sort of thing.

  I shook my head against my knees. What the hell was I doing, comparing Duncan’s startling of me to my meeting of Jamie? Jamie and I had met during a mutual friend’s leaving do – he’d been a university friend of Jamie’s, whilst I had worked in the same school. The friend had been preparing to leave for New Zealand, so we’d had a huge party. I’d been doing my usual, ‘No, you go on and dance, I’ll just sit here and mind the bags’, when a devastatingly handsome young man, with an unlikely assortment of facial hair, had swept me up and demanded that I show him my moves on the dance floor. And, from then on, we’d pretty much been inseparable, apart from the short visit to A&E after I’d lost concentration and slammed the door on his hand.

  Jamie. Tall and lanky, with golden hair and eyes so blue that they made the sky jealous. Kind, gentle Jamie, who I’d watched get paler and thinner until I worried that he wasn’t going to die, he was going to become invisible and exist on a plane I couldn’t see. My gorgeous, wonderful husband, who had learned to live with my only child foibles, my issues of control and tidiness; who hadn’t risen to my acerbic comments about his wayward family or his lack of ambition. Jamie.

  The rock in my chest rose and pressed behind my eyes. It forced a few tears, but the compulsion was less these days, as though the terrible weight was gradually eroding, letting me go. As though the memories were fading, as Jamie had faded, thinning and tattering at the edges until only the central core was left; the fact that I had loved him with all my being, and he was gone.

  ‘Phnngggg.’ Tab groaned in her sleep and turned over, opening her eyes as she did so, so she looked disconcertingly as though her eyelids were being wound open. ‘Why are you dressed?’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep again so I went for a walk.’

  ‘You need to shave your legs.’ And then she was asleep again, leaving me to eat the rest of the Kit Kat and sit alone, pondering, until the day got started properly.

  At lunchtime I tracked Duncan down and handed him back his socks. He was in the middle of the site, talking to Richard and a couple of students who were down a hole.

  ‘Thanks for these.’

  Both men looked at me. The students may have been looking at me too, but since they were down quite a deep hole and I could only see the tops of their heads, I couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Ah. A lecture on the dangers of unprotected socks,’ Duncan said, and then pulled a face. ‘Sorry. That was bad, even for me.’

  Richard raised his eyebrows. ‘Look, you two go and sort out the socks, I’ll deal with this.’ He jabbed Duncan with his elbow and made meaningful nods. ‘Why don’t you go up to the food tent and get some lunch?’

  ‘Well, I’m …’

  ‘I’ve just …’ we both said together and then looked separately embarrassed.

  ‘What are you both, ten? Just bugger off and let me do this.’ Richard squatted down to talk to the students and ignored us, which worked to the extent that Duncan and I found ourselves walking up the hill towards the catering tent.

  ‘I didn’t mean to be making an excuse not to have lunch with you,’ Duncan said. ‘I don’t want you to think that.’

  ‘I didn’t. And I’m not too keen myself, as it happens, but since we seem to be heading that way and there is a smell of gravy in the air and I suddenly realise that I’m actually quite hungry and that the wet sieves are not the attractant I first thought …’

  He looked at me and smiled. It was a nice smile, I had to admit, under the stubble and the mud blobs. ‘We are actually quite shit at this, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘For the record, Rich is always trying to set me up with women, but I’ve so far managed to resist. Well, mostly.’

  ‘And, equally for the record, I’ve no interest in being “set up”. I’m only here because Tabs wanted company, and I’m back off down to Swindon once my two weeks are up, to sort out classrooms and polish my whiteboard.’ I trailed off. There was a weird feeling in my chest, as though the words were echoing emptily, and I realised that I’d just repeated what Tabs had said about sad teachers in the holidays, unable or unwilling to stay away from work, to fill their days.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Duncan had stopped walking. ‘You look as though your eyes are being sucked into your brain.’

  ‘That sounds attractive. No, I’m fine, I’m just realising that I sound like Tabitha, and she’s demented, so, not a good thing.’ I was actually realising that I sounded self-justifying and unnecessarily bound up in my job, but that was none of his business.

  There was movement, up behind the canteen on the sandy track that served as an access road to the site, where the cars were parked, and someone called, ‘The police are here!’

  Duncan went pale. I saw the colour vanish from his cheeks, leaving dark stubble and hair against white skin, so he looked like a pencil sketch. ‘Shit.’

  ‘They still haven’t found Tessa?’ I knew this, actually, the on site talk had been of little else that morning, although the generally relaxed way everyone spoke about her disappearance, and the fact that just about everyone thought she’d gone off to York, had lulled me into thinking that the police weren’t going to bother.

  ‘No.’ The word sounded as though it was snipped off from a much longer internal monologue. Those fists were back in his pockets again, and the background spark had gone from his eyes. He looked hunted.

  ‘Ah, Professor McDonald.’ A man in police uniform came down towards us. ‘You do seem to attract trouble, don’t you, sir?’ And there was an edge to the words that seemed to make them mean, ‘You are the cause of a lot of trouble, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s a better approach than, “What have you done this time?” Hello, Marcus.’ Duncan took a deep breath. ‘Grace, this is Sergeant—’

  ‘Inspector, now.’

  ‘Sorry, Inspector Marcus Sunley. Oddly enough, we were at university together. I say, oddly, because he now seems to think I’m on the wrong side of the law. And this is Grace – I’m really sorry but I don’t think I’ve got the faintest idea of your surname.’

  ‘Nicholls.’

  The inspector didn’t offer a hand, so neither did I.

  ‘We just need to have a chat with everyone on site about the disappearance of Tessa Dalgliesh, is that all right with you, site director?’ And again, underneath the even, professional tone, there seemed to be an undercurrent of sarcasm.

  ‘Of course.’ Duncan had taken his hands out of his pockets now, although they were still more tightly fisted than they should have been.

  ‘And yourself. We need to talk to yourself.’

  ‘Why say that? Why no
t just say you need to talk to me? What’s all this “yourself” crap, is that in the police handbook or something?’ It actually sounded more like a challenge than an observation. Duncan was shifting his body about like a fighter in a ring about to lay someone out.

  ‘It’s all right. They just want to talk to you, you’re not in trouble.’ I said as gently as I could.

  ‘I wouldn’t take any bets on that,’ Duncan’s voice was grim.

  ‘Neither would I.’ The policeman, Marcus, wasn’t quite as grim, but he certainly sounded determined. ‘In here, perhaps, sir.’ He gestured at the food storage area beside the catering tent, and Duncan followed him in, wearing an expression that indicated he didn’t think he’d be coming back out again.

  I stood and stared after him for a minute. Why was he so worried about being talked to by the police? I remembered his nervous stance at the sight of the inspector, his shifty, defensive behaviour – oh, please don’t tell me that Duncan had something to do with Tessa’s disappearance! Oh that would just be typical! And then I sat down quite heavily as I questioned myself as to why it mattered whether or not Duncan was an innocent bloke who just happened to know a disappeared girl, or had done away with her.

  Because I liked him. Because, for the first time since Jamie died, I’d actually enjoyed spending time in the company of a man. Because he didn’t see me as an available woman or even, as had happened, an easy and gullible mark. Duncan just saw me as, well, a woman who talked to her dead husband in the pre-dawn hours and fell into streams at the drop of a hat – but he saw me as a person. As Grace. And that mattered.

  A policeman in a very shiny uniform took my name and patiently waited while I tried to remember my new address, noted down that I’d only just arrived on the site and then left. Duncan and Marcus were still in the catering tent and I didn’t know what to do. Given Duncan’s obvious unhappiness at the arrival of the police it seemed a bit callous of me to just carry on getting my lunch and eating it, but I couldn’t see anything else I could usefully do. I was vacillating around the entrance to the catering tent when Richard appeared at my elbow.