Raking the Ashes

by Anne Fine

  But it took thought and care. I had to get things right. Finally I made one phone call from outside the pub in this village in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘Tilly! For Christ’s sake! Your bloody man’s been mooning around outside the gates all week. Security are sick of him. And where the hell are you? You were supposed to be here early this morning, remember?’

  ‘I’m not coming back, Donald.’

  ‘Not coming back?’

  ‘Yup. Finished with the whole boiling.’ I carried on into the incredulous silence. ‘I’m going to start a brand-new life somewhere abroad,’ I lied. ‘I’m sorry not to have warned you earlier. It’s just that I knew Geoff would be there to look for me this morning. And this way I get a bit of a head start.’

  He wasn’t pleased. ‘So where the fuck are you?’

  ‘Gatwick.’

  There was a moment’s pause in which birds sang in branches above my head and, as if to make my perfidy even more obvious, a duck quacked loudly.

  ‘It doesn’t sound like Gatwick.’

  I gazed across the street to the village green. On a pretty roofed noticeboard there was an exhortation to the local citizenry to come to the meeting about the plan to clean out the old pond. ‘That’s because I’m in the airport’s new Meditation Centre. They run a tape of soothing country sounds.’

  Someone walked past me, saying, ‘Admiring the ducks on our filthy old pond?’

  ‘And a rather fine mural of wild birds,’ I added.

  I could tell Donald didn’t believe a word of it. I waited while he drew in breath and had a little think. Then he changed tack. ‘Look, sweetheart, I do see that having a bit of a stalker must be rather tiresome, even if it is your old man.’

  ‘He’s not my old man, Donald. Geoff and I have never married.’

  ‘Keep your hair on, Til. What about getting that other bloke of yours – what’s-his-name?’

  ‘Sol.’

  ‘Yes. Can’t you make him talk to Geoff? Explain what’s what, and all that. Get him to tell Geoff his time’s up, and he’s to hand over his side of the bed with a little more grace.’

  Amazing, isn’t it? They can’t imagine a woman might be set fair to get on with her life without a single one of them grasping her ankles. I didn’t bother to argue. After all, the more daft theories in the air when someone vanishes, the more successfully you cloud your exit. ‘It’s not that, Donald. It’s a whole lot bigger than that.’

  ‘What is it, then? What?’

  ‘I’m taking a new direction,’ I told him. (Choose to be anything. Fly!) Flippantly, I added, ‘Maybe I’ll go into wind farms. I reckon wind farms are the future. They must be crying out for people like me.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off, Tilly!’ he snapped. When he next spoke, he sounded miserable, as if he were the only one of the three who truly loved me. ‘Tilly, I’m going to do my level best to hold your job open for you. But if you don’t show up, it’s out of my hands and you know it. So you had better get your act together pretty quickly.’

  I could have told him, ‘Don’t bother, Donald,’ but the line had gone dead.

  Then it was back to work, studying the tide tables and the phases of the moon, and when they’d interlink. Meanwhile, I kept track of Geoffrey, secure in the knowledge he couldn’t keep track of me without Sol’s connivance.

  ‘Twelve, thirteen – fourteen bits of forwarded mail, Til. Most of it’s circulars and other crap. And Donald has sent down seven more letters from Geoffrey.’

  ‘Is he still down in Torbury Bay?’

  ‘No, no. It seems he’s worn out his welcome there.’

  ‘Is that what he says?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ I heard Sol rustling sheets of letter paper. ‘“Please, please write, Til,”’ he read out in an only slightly mocking imitation of how he thought Geoffrey might sound. ‘“But not to here, because it seems Elise has guests arriving unexpectedly from South Africa. Very old friends. She says she’s sorry but she needs the bed. And Tara and Harry say that though it was lovely having me before, now Tara has to get back to her course work, and it’s a thing about her, apparently, that she can’t concentrate if there is anyone staying in the house.”’

  ‘Well-diagnosed. Worn out his welcome there.’

  Sol kept on reading through the next disaster. ‘“So since Vanguard Direct have as good as warned me they’ll have to let me go if I’m not back by Monday—”’

  ‘Vanguard Direct? I thought Geoff worked for Stationery Supplies?’

  ‘He did. Till he was fired for taking too much time off.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Tilly,’ Sol reproved me, ‘that bit of bad news was in the last batch sent on by the post office.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘You just don’t care a fig, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Not any more.’

  Sol made a great play of rustling letters at me down the phone. ‘At least he’s faithful. He’s not giving up.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose I ever really thought he would.’

  Sol sighed. ‘So what am I supposed to do with all this stuff?’

  ‘The same as last week and the week before. Bank any cheques and burn the crap.’

  ‘And all these billets-doux?’

  ‘Begging letters,’ I corrected. ‘If I were you, Sol, I’d just gather them up and burn them too. Because they’re crap as well.’

  ‘You’re a cow, Tilly. Do you know that?’

  ‘Yes. And I’ve strayed off the range for good.’

  ‘Where are you, anyway? Or are you still not telling?’

  ‘That’s right, Sol. Still not telling.’

  In the end, Geoffrey rented a furnished room only a few streets from the house we’d left. ‘He claims it’s “quite nicely kitted out, considering”,’ Sol disapproved down the phone. ‘That means that, even though the man no longer has an income, he’s going to be paying quite unnecessary storage costs as well as a higher rent for the room.’

  ‘Be fair. He hasn’t any furniture of his own.’

  ‘You never took that too?’

  ‘It was all mine.’

  ‘Tilly, you’re such a bitch. If you don’t come and sleep with me soon, I’m going to begin to dislike you.’ Sol’s voice turned serious. ‘Actually, I mean it, Tilly. This time you’ve gone too far, and I can’t stand much more of reading these letters.’

  ‘You needn’t bother. I only need to know where he is. Just check the address at the top, then shove them in the bin.’

  ‘I can’t. They arrive in such pitiful-looking batches. I can’t help wanting to know what’s going on. And it is painful.’ I almost heard him make the decision to press on and say it. ‘Tilly, you really should get in touch with him. You ought to get it together to summon enough common charity to put this poor bloke out of his misery once and for all.’

  And so I did. I wrote the letter that explained I’d gone for good, and why. With fulsome apologies, I enclosed the very few pieces of Geoff’s paperwork I claimed had ‘by an oversight’ ended up in the wrong van. Somewhere among them, as if by accident, lay a clean copy of the information sheet I’d used as a bookmark in that little hotel, all those long years ago. On one side, photocopied onto fresh paper at one of Mr Stassinopolous’s brilliant new Print-It! franchises springing up all over, was the pretty Victorian etching of Lartington Tower itself, with ivy tumbling all over. And on the other there was the little hand-drawn map, unchanged, showing the Folly Edge Hotel, and the way that the roads lay. Of course I’d blotted out the ancient prices and the opening hours and, in their place, put in a reasonable weekly rental charge and, in an assumed hand, the dates booked by ‘Ms Tilly Foster’. The end date had been chosen very carefully. I know how Geoffrey ticks. The instant he realized he only had, at most, one day to catch me before I left, he would be up and away. To get the timing how I wanted it, I had no choice but to deliver the package by hand on the right evening. I left it to the very last to shove
the whole lot in an old used envelope with a smudged postmark, stick on a label addressed by hand to Geoffrey and, making some excuse about a sprained wrist, even persuade some amiable rambler passing my door to do me the favour of scrawling the words ‘Sorry. Package misdelivered next door’ across the top.

  Then I locked up this nice bright house that overlooks the duck pond, and drove back a hundred miles to the drab little one-eyed town in which I’d thrown away so many years. Without much trouble I found the block of flats into which Geoff had moved so recently. Sol had referred to the area as ‘pretty grungy, frankly, if you can judge by the tenants I have in that street’. And I admit that Geoff had certainly come down in the world.

  Still, not a problem much longer. Raising my raincoat hood, I left the car and crept down the darkened street. I was quite careful estimating floors and windows. Twice I went softly up and down the communal stair and back outside, to check that that sad blue flicker against the curtains came from a television in the right flat. I still had worries. Push the package through too soon and things might not work out right. Leave it too late and Geoffrey might have got so stuck into his drinking that even he might judge himself unfit to drive.

  In the end, I simply had to tell myself, ‘Go on, Tilly. Take a chance.’ I shoved the package noisily through his letterbox and legged it down the smelly concrete stairs and out of sight round the corner, back to my car, to start the long drive back.

  And of course he came after me. That very night. I’d done my homework well. I knew how long it would take him to drive that far down the coast on roads he didn’t know. I knew that, by the time he arrived, the tide would be out, exposing the vicious rocks. I knew there’d be no moon. Oh, bad Bad Tilly! I even knew that, if the gate a hundred yards beyond the Folly Edge Hotel had had its padlock removed with wire cutters, and been swung ajar, then anyone trying to follow some little hand-drawn map on a small sheet of paper would almost certainly fail to notice the first of the two warning signs.

  Dirt tracks to private properties by the sea are common enough. I knew that wouldn’t slow up Geoff when he was so determined to reach me before I left. As for the last sign – DANGER OF DEATH! CLIFF EDGE – well, to be frank, he simply can’t have seen it. Is it so bad to lean one giant safety warning against another? And the sign I had smuggled from the company store – YOU BREAK THIS RULE, WE FLY YOU OUT – was, after all, a lot more relevant to the occasion. I do expect he noticed that. But by the time it gave him pause for thought, it was too late. His car was already flying of its own accord off Folly Leap out into solid blackness and down to the rocks, where it burst into flames.

  Raking the ashes after, before the tide swept in to wash the mess away, the coastguard may even have come across a few charred scraps of a flyer that had a drawing of the old Lartington Tower. But when the coroner asked himself what Geoff was doing there, the answer seemed clear enough. I’d told them all about my final letter, and Sol had made it perfectly plain I’d only written it in the first place because he’d urged me. As everyone agreed, a woman has every right to leave her partner – especially if she’s not married. And when they looked into Geoff’s life, even the most ebullient investigating officer could understand how suicidal instincts might trouble a man so very clearly on the way down.

  Indeed, they’d been as kind and sensitive as they could be when they had tracked me down.

  ‘An accident? Dead? Truly? Oh, how horrible!’

  My hands were shaking. (I don’t believe they stopped till I had got that warning sign and the wire cutters safely away to the tip.) But both the police officers said it, again and again, ‘You mustn’t blame yourself.’ Sol said the same. ‘I know I called you wicked, Til. But really, if the man hadn’t got the bottle to keep on going just because you’d given him the final flick, you can’t be blamed.’ Ed took an even tougher line. ‘Don’t quote me, Tilly. But personally, I think that suicide’s despicable. It heaps so much onto the person who’s left.’ And Donald’s note, enclosing the last few letters, went further. ‘It was an aggressive act. Don’t let it spoil your new life, Til.’

  And they are right, of course. I mustn’t blame myself. No one can have it both ways. There can’t be one rule for some and another for everyone else. So either Geoff and I were both responsible for every single thing we did – or neither of us had a choice in how our characters made us deal with these matters. I sit here, blissfully happy that honours are even at last. He’s paid for twenty years of my life with twenty of his own – even a few more. I smile and watch the ducks and wonder what to do and where to go when I am ready. Sometimes I like to play with the idea that the two of us were both guilty as sin. At other times, I like to think that we were both innocent victims.

  One thing at least is true. We are successfully parted at last. And nothing will ever get to spoil that.

  THE END

  Reading Group

  Material

  LIFE at a glance

  BORN

  1947, Leicester, England.

  EDUCATED

  Northampton High School for Girls; University of Warwick.

  CAREER

  After short stints of teaching in both a school and a prison, Anne Fine worked as an information officer for Oxfam. In 1971 she moved to Edinburgh with her husband and first baby. Since then she has been a full-time professional writer. She has won numerous awards for her writing for children of all ages, including the Carnegie Medal (twice), the Whitbread Children’s Book Award (twice), the Guardian Children’s Literature Award and a Smarties Prize. From 2001–3 she was Children's Laureate.

  Her first adult novel, The Killjoy, was published in 1986, winning a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and recommended for the David Higham Prize for Fiction.

  Since then, Anne Fine has published five further novels for adults to great critical acclaim. In 2003 she was awarded the OBE and Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature.

  Q & A

  How did you start writing?

  The library in Edinburgh closed because of a blizzard. Stuck at home with nothing to read, I picked up a pencil, put my feet in the oven (on Regulo 1) and started my first book.

  Is that how you still work? With a pencil?

  Until each chapter is quite advanced, yes. I write in silence (apart from my own demented mutterings) and hide the page if anyone comes near. When each chunk’s finished I’ll type up and print out. Then I correct in pencil. Over and over again.

  How long does each novel take?

  Without interruptions, usually just over a year. But all authors have a natural speed and they tamper with that at their peril. I feel a bit sorry for young writers. They’re flattered and bribed into signing contracts with deadlines for books that aren’t yet even a rustle at the back of their brains. Small wonder there are so many fast downward trajectories in writing careers.

  Does that mean you don’t sign contracts?

  Not till I’ve almost finished, no. I’d hate to find myself beached up somewhere halfway through a book, wondering where it should go, yet having to keep churning the words out to meet some deadline. I think I agree with Raymond Carver: ‘If the writing isn’t the very best that you can do, then why on earth bother to do it?’

  You write for children as well. Is that very different?

  It’s differently pitched, yes. I write for the reader inside myself: myself at five, at eight, at twelve. The level of writing comes naturally. And I bear the old journalists’ dictum well in mind: never overestimate the reader’s knowledge and never underestimate his or her intelligence. But I am more protective of my younger readers. I try to be honest, but also try not to leave them with such a black picture of the world that they might not want to stay around in it.

  You write so much about families. Tell us about yours.

  My father was an electrical engineer. My mother stayed home to raise five daughters (me and my elder sister, then their last ditch attempt to get a son: triplet girls). I married at twenty, had my beloved
daughters, and lived in America and Canada for seven years. Their father wanted to stay. I wanted to come home. So after nearly twenty years the marriage ended. I’ve lived with Richard, an orchid specialist, for almost as long now. He has a son and daughter.

  Do you put friends and family in your books?

  Bits of them, here and there (though you do have to make efforts to disguise them, or they won’t stay your friends and family very long). Bits of myself too, of course. But characters grow so much under the pen that they end up surprising even their creators. I think what it boils down to is that writers don’t so much write about people they know, as write what they know about people.

  Plots. Do you have those all worked out before you begin?

  Never. In fact I tend to find myself snared into most of my plots by mistake, and have very carefully to pick some way out at the end. I’d love to write a book knowing from the start exactly where it’s going, but that sort of thinking, like the gift for chess, is simply not in me.

  Do you like the films of your work?

  No. Some even less than others. But I’m always aware that, as the author, I did get one very significant artistic decision, and that was whether or not to take the cheque. I reckon, if you’re paid, it’s only polite to keep your mouth shut, at least for a while after.

  What is the worst thing about the job? And the best?

  The worst thing used to be patronising men at parties. ‘You’re a writer, are you? So what do you write? Romances?’ Then I discovered the perfect answer: ‘No. Why? Is that what you read?’ That usually saw them off.