The departure of the gamekeeper had forced Edward Gill, as executor of the estate, to make a decision about its future. Mr Potts had not expressed any wishes about selling; Edward Gill’s opinion was that, for all Mr Potts cared, it could be left to rot. Which, unless an heir could be found, was exactly what would happen. An heir would almost certainly want to sell — any restoration would be tricky and expensive — and the estate would then most likely be carved up for development. Or the buyer might be just the sort of person who liked a challenge, in which case the house could be returned to its full, non-architecturally significant glory. Either way, it would be more dignified than a sad decline into decay. That is if an heir could be found, which seemed unlikely when, for over fifty years, none had made themselves apparent (Edward Gill apologised for the pun). Unwilling to fall at the first hurdle, Mr Gill had obtained the services of a genealogist, who’d uncovered that Mr Potts had a younger brother, who had left at the end of the nineteenth century to farm sheep in Canterbury, in New Zealand’s South Island. He was April’s great-great-grandfather Wilfred, and, thanks to his family from then on doing considerably less breeding than their sheep, April was his sole living descendant, and (the genealogist had double-checked) the sole living heir of the late Mr Lewis Potts. Current address easily found by the private individual with contacts, whose services had also been obtained by Mr Gill.
April shut the door of her flat behind her. The envelope the private individual had delivered still sat on her table, still plump with documents April had not dared look at. But it was like murmurs heard through a half-closed door — your imagination creates the story for you, and though you know full well there’s a true story that’s much less exciting, yours becomes the one you believe. Hidden words were secret words, and secrets kept had power.
The envelope held only one other document. Edward Gill had enclosed a copy of a large old-fashioned pen and ink drawing of the property, an aerial view that showed only the outline of the house and where it sat on the land — woods behind, farmland to the side. There was a walled garden, April saw, as she opened the map out fold by fold, and what appeared to be a large lawn. There were outbuildings — a garage, stables and, on the edge of the woods, some distance from the main house, the gamekeeper’s cottage. The cottage alone, Mr Gill had explained in his letter, was the only building in liveable condition. A cottage, perhaps, with an apple tree and roses over the lintel …
April folded the map back up, hating Edward Gill for sending it to her.
April glanced around at her flat, at her external world. It was small and beige and sparsely furnished. There was nothing pretty in it, no flowers or paintings, no coloured cushions or rugs. Everything from the towels in the bathroom to the mismatched cutlery had been bought cheaply, second-hand, and chosen quite deliberately to be plain and thin. April’s clothes were the same, thin and beige, her face unmade and her brown hair washed out with grey and pulled back in a tight, shapeless ponytail. In her cupboards the food was also plain, her diet unvarying. She rarely cooked, never baked, and the flat held nothing else that smelled good, no scented candles or fancy soap. There were no books, no television, no radio — no moments of escape. There was nothing around April to feed the senses, or the soul. Nothing to beguile, or encourage fancies.
But even as she looked, her beige walls shimmered and faded, and images again filled her head. A wood-panelled room with a stag’s head above the fireplace, a polished black coal range and bright-bottomed copper pans, a lawn like green baize stretching out forever, fruit ripening against a warm brick wall, blackberries plump and glossy in a hedgerow, a carpet of bluebells in a cool, airy wood, a bee alighting on an ample pink rose, an owl with a snowy speckled chest and gold-brown wings soaring in the dusk. More images. Memories. A yellow dress, fuchsia pink lipstick, a shiny green bag …
April dug her fingernails into her palms and the film reel in her mind ticker-ticked to a scratchy halt. These ideas, these fancies were becoming dangerous. They were speaking to her of a life that could not — must not — be hers.
She couldn’t risk waiting any longer. She would write to Edward V. Gill today and instruct him to sell.
April picked up the map, ready to stuff it back in the envelope. But in her haste, she had made the folds uneven. The bottom right-hand corner was exposed, and on it April could read the artist’s initials — J.P.
Mr Potts himself? No, of course not — his name was Lewis. Perhaps Mrs Potts? The drawing had been made by a delicate hand with an eye for detail. Why had Edward Gill not mentioned her? Where had she gone — and when? Had the Potts’s marriage fallen apart when their son died, just as April’s had? How had their son died? How old had he been at the time?
April checked her watch and was startled to see that it was twenty to six. The course she taught began at six, and the community education centre was a fast fifteen minutes’ walk away.
She grabbed her bag, and put Edward Gill’s letter and the map into it. Once her course was finished, she would use the college’s computer to write her own letter, and mail it and the map far away, so she’d never be tempted to look at it or think of the house again.
CHAPTER 3
late February
Edward V. Gill did not look like Gregory Peck. But neither did he look like the Dickensian character April had imagined, a collection of dry bones encased in tweed, who crackled like dead leaves when he walked.
Edward Gill had a tall, slender elegance, emphasised by a dark blue suit cut to follow the line of his long legs and slim torso. He looked much younger than April had expected, but then, as she reminded herself, he was not the septuagenarian of her imagining. He was only thirteen years older than she was.
He did look a little weary, though, she thought. His face was handsome in an understated way, good bones and clear, fair skin, but slightly sunken around the cheeks and jaw, as if he had a habit of clasping his hands to his face and dragging downwards. His eyes were faded blue, his hair a greying pale brown, curling just below the nape but quite long on top so that it fell occasionally across his eyes and he had to push it back. To April, it was a very English look, bordering on foppish. But Edward Gill was too low-key to be a fop. So low-key, in fact, April had the impression that if she blinked for a fraction too long, when she opened her eyes again, he would be gone.
‘You had no difficulties getting here?’
Edward Gill had a lovely voice, low and well bred. He spoke with a hesitancy that was not quite a stammer. Another very English trait, thought April.
She took the chair he offered her, one of a modern design that went with his other furniture but not with the room itself. His office was the upstairs floor of what had once been a terrace house in the town’s high street. It was above a shop that sold American college-style clothing for young people: flannel shirts and letterman jackets, white T-shirts with bland slogans. Outside, above the door that led upstairs, was a blue oval plaque. In the late 1800s, the house had belonged to a famous artist, whose name April had not recognised. Edward Gill’s office did not look much changed from the late 1800s. There was a fireplace, with a mahogany mantelpiece and tiled surround. The carpet was heavily patterned and primarily dark red, the curtains likewise but in dark green, the wallpaper of acanthus leaves printed in a not-much-lighter green. All that was missing, thought April, was an aspidistra. The spare modernity of his desk, chairs, sideboard and low sofa in the corner suggested their previous location had sported a lot of white paint and pale wood. It was as if a Japanese Zen garden had been forced to co-habit with an overgrown herbaceous border.
‘Difficulties?’ said April. ‘Not at all, despite the fact I didn’t have satnav. The rental-car man at Heathrow was Russian, I think, and he was staggered that I didn’t want it: “Is like voice from God showing you way.” But I said I had an excellent sense of direction and besides I couldn’t afford it, so he shrugged and said I would be in God’s hands anyway if not under His actual spoken command. I didn’t dare tell him
I wasn’t a believer. I had a moment of worry that the-God-I-don’t-believe-in had decided to punish me for hubris when I missed the correct lane for the M40, and was forced to do a detour through somewhere called Uxbridge. But after I pulled into a Little Chef and took a proper look at the map, I worked out that if I kept going I’d end up on the M40 anyway. After that, it was smooth sailing until I tried to find a place to park — is the town always this busy? Enjoyed the walk, though, even if I can’t feel my fingers any more. And I’m here now, safe and on time. So, no — no difficulties.’
Edward Gill nodded slowly. ‘Should I offer you coffee? Or would something less stimulating be of more use? Whisky, for instance? Or — though personally I think it tastes like it’s been strained through a shepherd’s sock — chamomile tea?’
‘No, thank you,’ said April. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t usually jibber-jabber like that. I’m still in shock that I’m here. I didn’t mean to be here at all. I’m not sure what happened.’
He cast a glance at the sleek sofa, which sat on the carpet about as comfortably as a nudist on an old wicker chair. ‘I rather know the feeling.’
‘Are you new in town?’
‘I came down from London around eighteen months ago.’
‘Down? Aren’t we northwest of London? Or did I get more lost than I thought?’
‘One always goes up to London and down to the country, no matter one’s starting point,’ said Edward Gill with an apologetic smile. ‘One of our many quaint and entirely irrational conventions.’
‘Were you tired of London?’
‘And thus tired of life?’ The smile alighted again briefly and flew away. ‘I’m sorry, did we decide on coffee or some sort of liquid sedative?’
‘Coffee would be wonderful,’ said April. ‘I’ve been travelling for over thirty hours and I’m not at all sure I’m actually awake. I may well be dreaming this.’
Edward Gill stood up. He was spare in his movements, a neat man, thought April. His desk was very tidy, the few items on it placed just so. There was no in-tray. The only sign of work was the one folder to his right, labelled in a cursive handwriting that seemed too faded and too old-fashioned to be Edward Gill’s. The label, April read upside down, said simply ‘Potts’, with a series of dates beneath it.
‘Excuse me while I ask Irene to make us coffee,’ he said. ‘I do actually possess a very good Italian espresso machine, but Irene considers it both foreign and vulgar and prefers to use the British-made Russell Hobbs electric percolator that her father bought in 1953. I feel duty bound to warn you that more than one of my clients refers to her coffee as The Black Death.’
April had met Irene when she arrived. Edward Gill’s secretary — for she could only be a secretary, the title ‘personal assistant’ being too redolent of modern impropriety — was in her late sixties. Like Jenny at home, Irene wore a blouse buttoned up to the neck, only Irene’s seemed to be silk not viscose, and her skirt was not navy polyester but tweed. Her grey hair was set in Her Majesty curls, and she wore pearls that April assumed had to be real, because on the third finger of her left hand she had a diamond of sugar-cube proportions, the largest April had ever seen outside photos of royal jewels. It surprised April that Irene was married, as she’d always imagined women of her kind to be perpetually single, their energy channelled into pug dogs or good works. She wondered if Mr Irene was still alive. April pictured him as the human equivalent of a pug dog — wheezy, with bulging eyes.
Edward Gill was speaking with Irene in the adjacent room that doubled as her office and the reception area. Irene’s own desk, and indeed Irene herself, did not look out of place in the Victorian décor. In his absence, April was tempted to open the folder marked Potts and find out more about her own inheritance. To find out more about her long-dead relatives. But that would be asking for trouble, so she did not.
April had not lied when she’d said she wasn’t sure how she came to be in England. That evening, less than three weeks ago now, she’d taught her course at the community education centre and afterwards, as planned, had sat down at one of the computers and written a reply to Edward Gill, instructing him to put the property up for sale. If a buyer could not be found within the next two years, April had written, then the house was to be boarded up and left — she almost added ‘to die’, but wrote instead ‘to its natural fate’. It sounded hard-hearted, but what other choice was there, if no one wanted it and there was no money for it to be restored?
She had printed out the letter and taken an envelope, being careful to put the right change in the petty cash tin. Then she’d taken the map out of her bag, intending to stuff it straight in the envelope. But it was as if the person who drew the map had whispered charmed words in her ear. She couldn’t help but open it up one last time.
April’s mother had been an amateur artist, her speciality quick sketches of babies and toddlers, made in whatever drawing material was at hand. Margaret’s sketches were delightful, and popped up everywhere in the Turner house, on paper napkins, in the phone book, on receipts, fleetingly on steamy bathroom mirrors. April had especially loved the sketches of herself as a tot, which her mother had continued to draw from memory, and had given to April randomly and always via intermediary means, tucked into the book she was reading or in her school lunchbox, and, after she’d left home, stuffed into parcels of old kitchen utensils and crockery that her mother no longer wanted but felt April must surely need in her flat. When Ben was born, April had regretted that her mother was not alive to draw him. Now, she was glad. A reminder connected to both her son and her mother would have been that much harder to throw away.
April had done her best to remove nostalgia, the ache for the past, from her life. But it seemed, as she looked at the map, that drawings of any kind still had a special power. Somebody drew this, she thought, perhaps somebody related to her. A person with a careful, controlled style. A person, it also seemed, who liked to hide things.
Looking closer, April had noticed tiny objects concealed within the drawing. An apple with a high metallic shine, so perhaps a golden one, in the garden, and close by it a beehive ringed with dot-sized bees. A lamb, small and white, lay apart in a field, and further away still, at the edge of the woods, stood a dog. It was black and its teeth were bared. A guard dog or a dangerous dog, one to keep away from? Maybe not a dog at all but a wolf?
A dog-wolf, an apple, a beehive and a lamb — if those four were symbols, April had no idea what they represented. The apple could mean temptation, and the lamb purity. The beehive could be industry. The wolf was an ancient animal, a shadow creature — a symbol of fear. But none of that helped much. None of it told April why they were there.
It was possible that they had no meaning at all. That the artist had simply drawn them for fun, embellishing the map with hidden objects for a child, perhaps, to search out. That could well be all they were: a game to test the keenness of your eye.
There was another detail April had missed the first time — a pennant inside the aerial outline of the house, with a name on it. In his letter, Edward Gill had referred only to ‘the Potts estate’. The house, April now saw for the first time, was called Empyrean. It was not a name she’d recognised, and she assumed it must be Biblical. It was a rather grandiose name for a house, April had felt, but if Mr Potts was a self-made man then perhaps he wanted the world to know that? Had Mr Potts been a 1920s Ozymandias? Nothing beside remains?
April had run her hand lightly over the map. The farm was gone now. But the house, colossal wreck though it may be, the garden, the woods — they were still there. And they belonged to her.
The instant that thought took hold, April’s intent had begun to unravel. The map-artist was no longer whispering but calling to her, hallooing her, inviting April to run with him or her, to run and run across fields, through woods, over fences. April could feel her feet thudding on the ground, the sweat sticking her shirt to her back, her heart pumping. She had no idea where they were going, or whether they would
stop at all. For all she knew, they might run for all eternity.
The rattle of the college printer, as it obeyed some internal cue to readjust, had made April jump. She was in a small, dim office, hand pressed against a map, and breathing hard, just as if she really had been running.
She had to go, she knew then. She had to see it. She would not change her mind about selling it, but April had the strongest feeling that if she did not see the place in its true light, it would persist, lingering half formed in her imagination forever. If she saw it, she decided, any glamour would vanish. The story she’d created around it would be replaced by the dull, dead truth. The house itself would become an empty shell, the map an ordinary drawing, flat and powerless. The map-drawer would become a name on a grave, long gone into dust.
April had walked the next day into a travel agent and used her parents’ money to buy a return ticket to England. She’d renewed her UK passport. She’d made sure there was enough money in her account to cover her rent for the next month, though she intended to be away for only a week. She’d apologised to the community education centre, and suggested a temporary replacement to teach her course. She’d said goodbye to Jenny, who was thrilled she was going and was convinced, despite being shown the return date on April’s ticket, that she would never come back. She’d boarded an aeroplane thirty-one hours ago, and now she was sitting on a pale oak-finish Thonet bentwood chair belonging to a man who seemed to be half elsewhere, waiting to be brought coffee by a woman with a diamond as big as the Ritz. It would not surprise her if she were, indeed, dreaming.
‘I thought,’ said Edward Gill, as he re-entered his office, ‘that you might like to see the estate this afternoon. Where are you staying? You could drop your car and your, er, suitcase there first, and I’ll pick you up in, say, half an hour?’
The Hiding Places Page 3