by Helen Slavin
Anna tipped the well-meant toast into the composting receptacle. She rinsed the mugs and the plates they had used and after that there was no other choice but to go to work.
* * *
The Castle Inn was a half-timbered, white rendered fortress that had defended its small and boozy foothold at the curtain wall of the castle for close on nine hundred years. Not that you would have guessed as much from the state of the art stainless steel splendour of Anna’s kitchen. Even her boss, Lella Finch, would not have argued that point of ownership, aware to a high degree that without Anna there wasn’t really a kitchen, just an assemblage of high spec cooking implements. Without Anna in her pinny, wielding pans, the Castle Inn would be a lesser and much hungrier place.
The wedding was the first they had catered. Barbara Bentley, leading light of the Castle Conservation Society, had recently taken the step of acquiring a wedding licence. The castle was set to make more money from this wedding than it did from entrance fees and Friends Of donations in a year. Lella Finch had been only too happy to link in with this enterprise and offer “the full package”. The Castle Inn, premier eatery that it was, was struggling against the new leisure complex at Castlebury and its invading army of Nando’s and Wagamama.
So, it was that today, Anna arrived in the safety of her kitchen, pulled on her pinny and prepared to face her demon.
There was already activity in the low-ceilinged room. There were bed and breakfast guests booked in and Casey, Anna’s assistant, was gearing up for the breakfasts. Lella was standing by the fridge with a mug of coffee, her fuel of choice.
“Can I do you some scrambled eggs?” Casey asked as Anna began prepping for the wedding cookery.
“Yes. Do her some, Casey. You’re going to need your A game today Anna… oh my God where is that bloke with the helium?”
Lella looked flustered despite her usual chic, black outfit. There were little beads of sweat at her hairline and lipstick on her teeth. “God, I can’t believe we’ve booked in five more of these epics. I think we need sectioning.”
Anna smiled. It was an easy mask.
The wedding proved inescapable. Every last inch of the Castle Inn was bedecked with flowers, starbursts of gypsophila, pale roses and waxy-looking orchids. Creamy ribbon gift-wrapped anything that didn’t move and Lella was engaged in the mammoth task of filling golden balloons with helium. In the Great Hall itself the heavy oak tables had been disguised with damask and rose petals and sparkles.
Anna’s grief was never referred to directly. The Way sisters talked of ‘last October’ but now, with the first anniversary looming ahead and the inescapable fact that a whole year had passed, they began to say “Anna’s October” instead, pinning it in time. It was unspeakable, all that had happened at Hallowe’en last year.
The Ways each had their own way of dealing with the disaster if, at any point, they were reminded of it or caught out remembering.
Vanessa, scientific as always, had a short mantra, marriage, birth, death, that kept the dread and the sadness sealed into a petri dish in her head.
Charlie counted backwards when memory threatened. Some days it would be backwards from fifty. Some days one hundred. There had been a terrible Tuesday when it had begun at one thousand.
Emz saved one memory of Ethan’s tiny new feet when she held him on the day he was born. She held a memory snapshot of how happy Anna and Calum had been, everything she felt was saved into that moment and moved no further.
Anna had shut everything down, weighed memories with stones and sank them deep into a black well at the very furthest edge of her mind. But there were days, like this one, when the well burbled with cold dark water and threatened to drag her into its narrowed depths.
Anna knew that many people had got married in the months since October, but none had been married right in her face. Other weddings, she could ignore and evade, but for this wedding, she was providing the heart of the celebration, food they might never forget.
She coped by cooking. The glint of her knife seemed like a sword in her battle. Her voice called out instruction without thought, her instinct and skills took charge, defended her battered heart, produced a feast.
Late in the day, with the clearing up under way, twilight was falling, and Anna needed to escape. She’d been stupid and stubborn and not taken a break and so now she was tired and thirsty. She had run a marathon, both in her cooking and emotionally, and now she made her way into the small stone courtyard at the back of the kitchen with a mug of tea. On, beyond the dumpsters and recycling, a thin wooden gate led out into a little used, half-forgotten beer garden. It had once been a leafy little hideaway strung with fairy lights but as the Castle Inn expanded and bought up the property next door, this beer garden had been superseded by the lush garden there, landscaped with hedges and roses, trinkled into by a fountain peopled by mermaids and mythical-looking fish.
For now, Anna sat on a forgotten wooden bench beneath the tumbled boughs of an ancient and neglected wisteria. She sipped from her mug of tea and swept out her mind. In the near distance she could hear music from the Great Hall. There was country dancing now, clapping and a fiddle and before she could earth it, the dark magic of memory sparked.
* * *
Anna and Calum had tried to organise their wedding day the way other people organised weddings, but nothing had gone according to those kinds of plans. As a consequence, Anna was in the kitchen at Hartfield Hall with a linen pinny on over her wedding gown and Calum was outside organising the parking. Charlie and Aron had set up the makeshift bar with Drawbridge vans rolling up at the last minute to fulfil the need for booze. Everyone needed booze after today, most especially the vicar.
The Reverend Kaylie Hunter was moving to another parish, this wedding, the marriage of Anna Way to Calum Atwood was the last ever to be conducted at Woodcastle’s little church and so it was not surprising that the little church protested.
The weather was thundery, the sky, which had been blue, darkened almost to black. The wedding car had come to collect Anna and her mother from the new house and had got lost.
“You’re not on the sat-nav…” moaned the driver.
At the church a sudden squall of wind tore Anna’s veil from her head hooking it up into the dense velvet green boughs of the churchyard yew tree. It snatched at the skirt of her dress so that a seam tore on the car door. As she made her way up the path the rain began to fall in heavy drops.
Inside the church the organist was playing off-key and the rain had begun to pour in through the hole in the lead above the chancel. Despite all of this elemental interference, the Reverend Kaylie had rallied everyone to the happy cause, there were smiles, rippling laughter and, at last, the ceremony began.
“… If anyone knows of any just cause or impediment why these two may not be joined together in holy matrimony…” she asked, confidently, “let them speak now or—” she did not finish the sentence as the colony of more than two hundred greater horseshoe bats that had lived in the belfry for the last century or so decided they had had enough of the leaky roof for today and made a spirited exit.
“Bat confetti!” Calum had joked to nervous laughter.
With screaming guests finally rounded up, the service completed at last, the wedding party attempted to take photographs, but the rain would not stop.
“Shouldn’t you do something about this?” Calum’s father glared at Vanessa, “you’re a scientist, aren’t you? Isn’t this global warming?” There was an awkward silence.
“I’ll see about having a biodome installed.” Vanessa responded with just a hint of sarcasm. Then one mobile phone rang out, then another, a third, bringing the less-than-good tidings about the reception.
“Power outage?” Once again Calum’s father looked furiously at Vanessa as the news came through. “Well what are you going to do about it?”
“She’s a scientist not an electrician…” Charlie chipped in. “Any ideas?” Charlie looked to Anna, in the way that the Ways alw
ays did.
“I can cook,” Anna announced.
“That’s a very practical solution…” Grandma Hettie smiled.
“Practical? Where can you cook?” Calum’s father questioned. “Are you planning an impromptu barbecue?” He held his hands up to the rain.
“That’s an idea.” Anna stalled for time.
“My place,” Winn piped up. “Should have thought of it before… the kitchen’s fully operational… I’ve got plenty of room for everyone in the Dining Room.” The Way side of the wedding party, chiefly the sisters, Grandma Hettie and Vanessa, all greeted this suggestion with enthusiasm. Calum’s mother looked at Calum’s father with a pinched expression.
“I don’t think that that is at all approp—” Calum’s mother began to disapprove. His father nodded.
“Mum, it’s fine. Needs must and all that…” Calum spoke up but his father stepped forward, a finger jabbing at Calum’s cravat, making the fake diamond pin in it wink with light.
“No. Your mother is right Calum. This is a fiasco. Something should be done about it. We should complain. You should certainly get your money ba—”
“I’VE GOT A FULLY STOCKED WINE CELLAR.” Winn’s voice boomed, and that decided it.
* * *
As the wedding party mustered at Hartfield Hall the rain ceased and the sun steamed everything as Emz and Winn rounded up the Jacob sheep who had escaped from their pen by the stables and were now grazing across the front lawn. They were being assisted by Calum’s father and brother. Calum’s father was pointing a lot and giving instructions that no one heeded, least of all the sheep.
“Emz looks like Bo Peep…” Grandma Hettie joked as she peeled carrots and Anna laughed. Calum’s mother was fussing by a vast tea urn, waiting for it to boil.
“Well… this has been ‘different’,” she commented, her voice a little shrill. Anna sensed that Calum’s family were not impressed with the event.
They were traditionalists, his parents. The wedding had to be done their way and Anna had backed down from a lot of arguments in the last year.
“Can’t we just have a handfasting?” she’d asked Calum when the wedding planning began to take on aspects of a military campaign. “Just you and me and some Druid priest in the woods?”
He’d done that teacher trick of his with the raised eyebrows. She smiled to herself and her mind drifted to a secret spot, high on the ridge named Crow Houses, Calum’s face, a froth of feverfew, a tangle of ivy.
It seemed to Anna that weddings involved too many rules. Calum’s sister had insisted on the style and colour of the bridesmaid’s dresses, not caring what Emz might think, and, in the end, Charlie had refused to wear hers. There had been rules about flowers, more regulations about table decorations and the protocols for the wearing of hats. The seating plan had been like a United Nations Summit and increasingly Anna had seen her own family as a small principality shunted to a table near the toilets.
Now, in the aftermath of bats and power cuts, Anna pushed all that stress aside and concentrated on the cooking she had to do. She felt energised, a happiness bubbling up inside her as ovens were coming up to heat. The chickens that Winn had so kindly dispatched for them were sitting in roasting trays loaded with herbs from the overgrown kitchen garden. This, to Anna, had become the perfect wedding. She picked up the cloth and opened the first oven door on the beautiful ancient range. She shoved the chickens inside.
“Should you cook chickens like that?” Calum’s mother looked harried. She had not taken off her little feathery fascinator and so, rather disturbingly, she looked a little chickeny herself.
“It’s how I usually do them.”
“No. I mean… they’re only just dead, that woman, she…” Calum’s mother looked a bit pale. “What I mean is they’re very fresh aren’t they?” she managed a smile. Anna shut the oven door.
It was Calum’s brother, Hamish, who played Winn’s old violin, his sister joining in on the grand piano, there were candles reflected in the tall mirrors in the ballroom. Beer. Wine. Champagne. No cake. It was stranded on the bridge. But it didn’t matter did it?
“Do you love me?” Calum asked as they grabbed a few moments alone in the kitchen. Anna kissed him.
“Course.”
“Then that’s all that matters.”
Dancing. Dancing. Dancing. Kissing. Kissing. Kissing. Do you love me?
* * *
Anna could not bear the weight of memory. She had to get back to the kitchen. Where it was too hot, too bright, very shiny, black butterflies. Who had black butterflies for confetti?
“Drink this.” When Anna came to she was lying on the pink chaise lounge in Lella’s office. Casey was sitting beside her offering a large glass. Lella was standing behind, chewing her finger anxiously.
“She alright? Anna, you alright?”
“She’s fine.” Casey was calm, matter of fact “… or she will be if she drinks this.” Anna hitched herself up slightly, she took the glass and took a gulp. She spluttered and coughed.
“Gin…” she croaked.
“Yes. Water doesn’t have the same kick in the pants.” Casey winked. “Drink up. Your sister is coming to collect you.”
It was Aron’s car that pulled up some quarter of an hour later. Charlie got out looking very dressed up and it was clear that they were, or had been, on their way to somewhere special. Aron was, as ever, all smiles, moving with his panther grace to hug Anna.
“Hey Anna.” His voice soft and concerned, his hug so tight it was grinding her bones. “You fit?” He picked up her bag, her coat, taking charge, Charlie, a silent sidekick.
His car was new, smelling of leather and aftershave. It had a claggy silence to its interior and Charlie was turned around in her seat at the front.
“Long day?” she asked. Anna nodded from the black leather cave of the back seat.
“Who was getting married? Anyone we know?” Charlie asked in a tone that was so not Charlie it made Anna’s ears hurt. Something happened to Charlie when she was with Aron, it was like watching a television where the volume and brightness were turned up too high.
“Waste of money.” Aron commented with a snarl in the rear view. Anna changed the subject.
“How was the meet and greet at the cottage?” Anna wanted to hear about something good, about Cob Cottage and holidays.
“Bit of a disaster. Rude woman. Moaning about the traffic noise and the water supply… God it was a relief to get away from there.”
Anna nodded. That was not what she had wanted to hear. She wanted Cob Cottage to be a haven. So far everyone who stayed there had been grumpy or miserable and made their week’s stay seem like a month for the Way sisters. Complaints. Confusions. Minor calamities. Don’t even think about that whole refund situation. She felt very anxious about the woman, as if she ought to go there right now and try to put things right.
Anna could see Aron was turning towards Castle Row and she didn’t stop him, it was a shorter journey there than to her mother’s house, but Charlie piped up.
“Oh… no, Aron. We’re not taking her home, we’re taking her to my mum’s.”
Aron made a brief clicking sound with his teeth and turned the car at the lights, swinging round recklessly so that they mounted the pavement.
Anna had no idea what they talked about for the five-minute drive to her mother’s house. Charlie filled all available breathing space with chit-chat and when they pulled in at the kerb Anna was profuse with her thanks.
“Any time, Anna.” Aron gave her a momentary intense stare that seemed to convey a definite message but before Anna could translate it the car had pulled away and she turned towards the house.
It was dark. Her mother had not come home and probably would not return tonight. Anna could imagine her mother snoring on the drop-down sofa in her office, interns and graduate students ranged on camp beds and lilos around her.
She ought to be hungry, so she tried to eat some food. There would be some of the ham of c
ourse. Anna opened the fridge, the cold white light illuminating the hank of dead creature that was the ham. It looked, in the general empty bareness of the fridge, like something remaindered from an autopsy.
Anna stood beside the kitchen island, aware suddenly that its shiny black granite worktop reminded her of a toppled tombstone.
She was drifting badly of late. Since last October she had divided her living spaces into a small side office at the Castle Inn where there was a squidgy, back-breaking couch and Cob Cottage. There were many nights where she had walked through Havoc Wood because the only place where she might rest was Cob Cottage, where Grandma Hettie would not pity or patronise her. With Grandma Hettie gone, she had wandered to her mother’s house in recent weeks, but it was new and unfamiliar, like a motorway service station.
She could feel the darkness rolling inside her, not helped by the stupid worktop. She had to pull up short, she had to outrun the darkness. She thought about Emz. It was already nearly half past nine and she was still at Prickles.
Anna listened as Emz’s phone rang out which meant that Emz was at least busy in the infirmary or one of the other buildings and not wandering the woods where there was no signal to be had.
“Hello Prickles Sanc… no sorry… I mean hey… Anna.” Emz sounded flustered.
“Hey. I wondered if you need a ride home or anything? It’s late and dark. Mum isn’t here and Charlie’s out, but I can come and pick you up if you’d like?” Anna needed to do something, to busy herself, to leave this empty house. Charlie’s car was in the drive and she’d hardly sipped that glass of gin.
“It’s okay. We’ve got a bit of an emergency on here, so Winn called in Carrie. I can get a lift back with her. I’ll see you later.”
The house was silent, and Anna had, she noticed, still not switched on the light. It was something of a trial to try and do so, her mother had had a digital lighting system installed that went far beyond a simple on or off combination. Anna did not feel in the mood to tackle the technology. She sat in the darkness for a few moments and felt restless. She knew where she wanted to be, and it was closed off to her. The rude woman would be enjoying the cosy comfort of the wood burner at Cob Cottage, inhaling the scents of the garden at night. A memory of her grandmother then; dressed in her oldest black, waxed raincoat, turning to look at her. There was an intent look upon her face, the lake water glimmered moonlit in the background, but Anna couldn’t place the time or the date of the memory. “Anna” her grandmother said.