The Present

by Charlotte Phillips

  ‘I feel like I need to call some kind of time on this sort-out,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘I can’t devote all my time to it, however much I might want to. You should get on with … well, with whatever it is that you have to get on with.’

  Not much currently. Although there was always the option of an early flight out before the country launched itself into its full Santa-themed, twinkly lit, supermarket frenzied Christmas mode. She reached the skip and tipped the box full of old crockery into it with a crash. Not to be outdone, he lobbed the TV after it.

  ‘Is this about the drinks and nibbles thing?’ he said. She had already turned on her heel to make yet another trek back into the house. She was wearing a T-shirt, and the temperature was somewhere around zero. Clearly, she’d been striding in and out of the house for long enough to work up a sweat. He headed after her. ‘Will you just stop for a second and talk.’

  ‘It is absolutely NOT about the drinks and nibbles thing,’ she said.

  Clearly, it was.

  ‘AND I don’t have time to stop and talk. I need to get this house clearance under way, and I have to fit in a visit to the hospital to see Gran. And …’ she thrust a hand into her jeans pocket and pulled out a sheet of A4 paper which she waved in the air ‘… I have a list a mile long of stuff to do if I’m going to bring Christmas in to a decent standard.’

  He made a grab for the list as she wafted it near his face, and unfolded it.

  ‘What the fuck?’ He speed-read it. ‘You really do need superpowers if you think you’re going to tick every item off on this thing in the space of a couple of weeks.’

  She reached for the sheet, and he held it high up out of her reach.

  ‘You know the best thing you can do with this?’ he said, grinning down at her as she jumped up trying to grab it back.

  ‘In the absence of giving Kirsty Allsopp a ring and delegating, the best thing I can do is probably postpone sleep for a few nights and quit talking to you because. You. Are. Holding. Me. Up.’ She punctuated each word with a futile leap into the air. He was way too tall for her.

  ‘Nope. This is the best thing you can do with it.’

  He screwed the list up into a ball and lobbed it very deliberately into the middle of the skip. She let out a squawk and made a useless attempt to scale the high metal side and scramble after it.

  ‘There is a reason why you are stalling on this house clear-out,’ he said. ‘Have you really not considered that? Your subconscious does not want you to offload this house.’

  She totally ignored him and continued to try to pull herself up.

  ‘This place is obviously important to you, and you are rushing into selling it without properly thinking through what that actually means. Why don’t you listen to your instincts, instead of following a bloody list of tasks that means nothing?’

  ‘This is not some joke,’ she said. ‘Listening to your instincts might work for you with your hippy, dippy, disappear-at-the-drop-of-a-hat, let’s-go-base-jumping-instead-of-doing-anything-sensible attitude to life, but I do not run my shit that way. Down that road lies the life of an unreliable flake, and that is the last thing Gran needs right now. Now will you do something responsible for a change, and get my list back out of that skip before I sack you?’

  ‘You can’t sack me. My work here was done. Technically, I am here on my own time. I am saving you from yourself here.’

  ‘I don’t have TIME for this.’

  He grinned at her infuriated expression. She was really very cute when she was wound up.

  ‘’Course you do. Looking into Olive’s past is far more important than chucking rubbish out. She isn’t going to care if you’ve put half her house into a skip, or left it where it is. She might care if you can talk to her and bring back some happy memories. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.’

  He couldn’t quite fathom why it was so abhorrent to him that she could be letting go of things she would never be able to get back in this stupid rush to put the house up for sale.

  ‘Do you?’ she said. She stood back from the skip, put her hands on her hips, and looked at him expectantly. ‘How exactly? Because you’re doing a great impression of just being a bloody PAIN.’

  He swept on before she could press that question any further.

  ‘Look, why don’t you take today off. I’ll help. Let’s take the locations you’ve got from your gran, and the names, and go and do some proper research.’

  She frowned.

  ‘What, you mean, like, go out?’

  ‘Well maybe Wi-Fi would be a start, right? You could come to my place.’

  She pulled a sceptical face at him.

  ‘Hah. We’re talking about doing some historical research, and your suggestion is your place. Why am I not surprised?’

  He plastered a mock-innocent expression on his face.

  ‘For the Wi-Fi only. I am perfectly capable of not leaping on the nearest woman just because she happens to venture under my roof.’ He clapped her on the shoulder cheerfully. ‘And you needn’t worry. You’re not my type.’

  ‘You mean I’m not interested in some meaningless jog-on-afterwards fling with no responsibility? If that’s your type, then I’ll happily pass.’

  ‘There’s actually a lot to be said for living in the moment, but it’s your loss.’

  ‘Really?’ She folded her arms.

  ‘I refer you to – I think it was – that golden egg tree decoration. Whoever he was, he knew what he was talking about. Remember each moment we have in every detail and let it sustain your heart. Or words to that effect.’

  ‘Do not use those gorgeous sentiments to back up your no-strings pulling approach,’ she said. ‘Do not even go there.’

  ‘Okay, okay. Maybe not my place. Why don’t we take the location and drive out to where the hostel was, see if there’s any local information we can pick up? It won’t take that long in decent weather. We could call in at whatever the local news office is at the same time. We can spend a few hours, and then I will personally come back here and throw whatever the hell you want me to in that skip all evening, so you won’t really have lost any time at all.’

  ‘And get my bloody list back out?’

  ‘If it’s still that damned important to you by the end of the day, then yes.’

  Silence while she stared into the skip.

  ‘I was thinking of ringing up the local press in Hertfordshire, see if they could point me towards anyone I could talk to about the Land Army. I really can’t spend time on this at home, it would cause problems, I’ve got other stuff I need to be doing.’

  ‘Well, there you are then. So all this letting it go and filling the skip up really is a load of bollocks,’ he said. ‘What you really want to do is find out more. Get your stuff and get in the van. And that’s like the platonic equivalent of Get your coat, you’ve pulled. See how I’m rewriting the rules for you?’

  That at least got a smile, even if it was pre-empted by an eye roll. She took a step away from the skip and rubbed her dusty hands on her jeans.

  ‘Okay then. Sounds like a plan. Just a few hours.’

  Chapter 5

  Horston Green was not at all what they had expected, having read about it in the archives at the newspaper office in the nearest town. It had a postcode, and a status on satnav that surely implied that it would be inhabited. Pulling up a long steep lane in the van, winding around bends, the only other vehicle on the road that they encountered was a tractor.

  ‘Well, it’s definitely rural, no arguing with that,’ Lucy said.

  There was farmland for miles around. Stopping for a sandwich in the one pub boasted by the nearest village, they’d been directed to try the post office for local information. Jack watched Lucy interrogate the locals. She had an inquisitive energy about her that dulled everything else going on in the place. When she zeroed in on something in the conversation, she couldn’t sit still, standing up and pacing, twisting her hair, stopping to write things down. Her que
stions about Horston Green Hostel were met with surprise.

  ‘You mean the community place?’

  The woman behind the counter was channelling shop assistant, postwoman, and gossip central. The clientele couldn’t resist elbowing their way into the conversation. Clearly Horston was a sleepy little place if Lucy’s odd little history quest was considered to be gossip-worthy.

  ‘It was used as a hostel for the Land Army in World War Two. My gran was posted there, and I thought maybe I could get a few pictures of the place for her, of how it looks now, perhaps see if there’s anyone locally who remembers it.’

  He watched her focusing in on the answers.

  ‘It was just abandoned at the end of the war. No one wanted the upkeep of the place, I think it was already very run down.’ The postwoman scratched her head. ‘Then it was used as a community location for foster kids at some point in the eighties, I think. Been a while since it’s been used for anything much.’

  It certainly looked as if it had been derelict for a very long time. It stood at the top of a long drive, a huge and imposing building with three storeys, and a lot of out-of-control shrubs around it. The building itself was in a grey brick, with tall and narrow windows. There were tiles missing from the roof, and peeling paintwork. Except for one on the ground floor showing ragged, garish curtains, the windows were boarded up.

  ‘It looks almost Gothic,’ Lucy said, peering at it through the windscreen of the van. ‘I bet it’s creepy at night.’

  The garden was huge and overgrown, and the cold ground was hard underfoot. He could imagine that when it rained here the place would be a mud fest. The trees at the perimeter were stripped of leaves, just as the house had been stripped totally of care and attention.

  ‘You can see why it was used as a hostel,’ he said. ‘It’s massive, they must have been able to house loads of people here, and it’s smack in the middle of all this farmland.’ He walked backwards away from the house so he could take in the full scale of it. ‘And why it’s been left to rack and ruin. It would take a huge injection of cash to sort this out and make it habitable. And it’s not like it’s got great access, is it? That road up here was hell.’

  ‘It just looks like it’s been forgotten about,’ she said.

  She pulled a couple of abandoned wooden boxes over to the wall beneath the unboarded window and clambered onto them. She stood on tiptoes and framed her eyes with her hands against the cloudy glass, craning to see in.

  ‘Try not to fall through those. Not with your safety record,’ he said.

  ‘I am perfectly fine,’ she said. ‘It looks like it might have been a kitchen; I think I can see taps and a sink.’

  She jumped back onto the grass and walked over to him, then turned to look back at the place.

  ‘Maybe it’s a bit of a dead end, this,’ she said. ‘I really appreciate everything you’re doing, but I don’t really get why you’re bothering. Could you really afford the time out today? I mean, don’t you have a cliff to dive off somewhere or something?’

  He glanced sideways at her.

  ‘Already done that,’ he said.

  Two summers ago, Majorca. Hot sunshine beating down, blue sea in the distance below. People gathered in a small crowd, watching. Sean had stepped up first, and he had followed. The thrill of the drop followed by the shock of the cold water. The adrenaline kick lasting into the evening, just hanging out and having a laugh.

  ‘You’re insane,’ she said. ‘What was it like? I mean, isn’t there a risk of DEATH?’ She pulled a scary face, and then turned it into a smile.

  Oh, the hideous irony that they’d played with risk so many times, and then Sean had died playing bloody football. What a sick sense of humour fate had.

  ‘It was amazing,’ he said. ‘You get a real rush from doing things that are more and more out there. Pushing yourself, trying the unknown. Life’s so short. I can’t see the point in sticking to the mundane and boring.’

  She began to walk slowly further around towards the other side of the house. There was a large rotting shed in one corner over by a fence.

  ‘Sometimes there’s something really special about things that look mundane and boring from the outside,’ she said. ‘I mean, when I was a kid we did the British summer holiday. Same thing, year on year. My grandparents were old school. Cornwall. Crab fishing on the sea wall, cream teas, fish and chips on the beach. We’d stay in a bed and breakfast, and I ate ice cream every single day.’ She put her head on one side, remembering. ‘Not a cliff dive or a stab of adrenaline in sight, but you can’t imagine how much I’d love to have those times again.’

  ‘We used to go camping,’ he said, surprising himself with the recollection. How long had it been since he’d thought that far back? His memories of Sean’s last few years were so vivid and clear that they dominated his recall. They were the times he really felt cheated of, he supposed, because they were closest to what had been taken away. He was struggling with the present, the new present that he hadn’t expected and did not want. It was easy to overlook their shared childhood when there was a whole future that had just disappeared into thin air. ‘My dad was great at putting up a tent. We used to climb trees, sit around the campfire, play board games in the tent when it rained.’ He focused on the memory. ‘We stayed on farmland, actually. This place reminds me of it a bit.’

  She jumped a little as her mobile phone started to ring in her coat pocket, and she fished it out.

  ‘Hello?’ She mouthed sorry at him, turning and walking back towards the van, her phone pressed to her ear. He watched her go, with her childhood holiday memories and her weird ability to make something that should be run of the mill sound like something memorable. It had been a mistake suggesting this, inadvertently spending hours letting her run amok with her reminiscing, when he tried to avoid that very thing at all costs.

  He checked his own phone. The one redeeming feature of this place seemed to be that it actually had a signal. He opened the Internet browser. Brought up one of his go-to sites for last-minute flights, and punched in a date range to cover the next few days, flights to Austria. Then he followed it up by looking at a few hotels where he could crash and get in a bit of extra boarding for a couple of days before the booked trip. He was careful to look for somewhere off the beaten track: the last thing he needed was to turn up smack in the middle of a Christmas market, when all he wanted was to quiet his mind by concentrating on the physical activities.

  This was the answer. Keep it moving, one goal to the next. After a year and a half, he had come to realise it was the only thing that worked.

  Jack’s clapped-out work van had a heating system that boiled her feet, but did very little to keep her warm from the waist up. At least she could tell herself she’d done some work towards expanding on the tiny shreds of information in Gran’s belongings. And she’d taken plenty of pictures she was sure Gran would be interested in seeing when she was better. Jack was uncharacte‌ristically quiet. One hand on the top of the steering wheel, holding it steady. His eyes fixed on the road. The outing had obviously dulled him into submission.

  ‘Thank you for taking me there,’ she said. ‘It makes it feel so much more real, somehow, having seen it and how remote it is. Even though the hostel is derelict, the area around it can’t have changed that much. You get a real sense of how rural it must have been for Gran, coming to live there after being in town all her life.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘I’ll see what comes of my phone calls, but if I get nowhere I might try the National Archives at Kew.’

  As if she had a spare hour to spend anywhere right now, unless it was related to Christmas preparations. She noticed he made no offer to accompany her there. Clearly one investigative trip with her was enough for him.

  Her mobile phone pinged in her bag, and she jumped guiltily. Ever since the drinks party had slipped her mind the other night, she’d been expecting Rod to ring at any given moment to check up on her. She fished it out of he
r bag and looked at the screen. Not Rod. Number unknown, but she picked the call up with a surge of excitement.

  ‘Oh great, this might be the woman from the newspaper office this morning,’ she said to Jack. ‘They said they’d call me back if they found anything on any of the names.’

  One second on the line, and it was clear that it was most definitely not her contact in Hertfordshire.

  There was a clatter, and a distant, ‘Gin & tonic, please, lots of ice.’

  Only one person she knew would be drinking a G and T on a Monday afternoon. Her shoulders sagged.

  ‘Mum?’

  There was another clatter as the phone was picked up in a rush.

  ‘Lucy, darling? I tried you at the house, but I got that wretched answering machine, and I can’t talk to that thing.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘I thought I’d check in, see how Mother is. And you, obviously.’

  Obviously. Ever the afterthought.

  There was the sound of a cash register slamming, and jovial laughter.

  ‘Mum, are you in a bar?’

  ‘Just sorting out wages, darling, you know what it’s like. I’ve just finished a run of shows for a top resort hotel. Very plush. Smoky jazz in their piano bar, that kind of thing.’

  Lucy stared up at the ceiling of the van and waited for her mother to get to the real point. Veronica Jackson didn’t call people just to pass the time of day, because the only time anyone else entered her sphere of consciousness was when she needed something from them.

  ‘Thought I might take a break for a few weeks, was thinking of dropping in on the off-chance. Spread a bit of Christmas spirit around, you know how it is. See the family, have a bit of a catch up.’

  There it was. There was a loaded pause while she waited for an invitation to stay. Lucy pressed her lips together hard to suppress the exasperating instinctive response, which after all these years was still to offer. Did the hope that the woman might somehow morph into reliable and dependable parent never disappear, even after thirty years of her demonstrating the opposite?