by Ann Swinfen
* * *
The weather had turned cloudy again, and cool, more like a normal English May. Tom telephoned from Manchester on Friday evening to say he would not be able to make it home for the weekend.
‘Sorry. I have to meet these people in the council again at eight o’clock on Monday morning, and I’m going to fit in a briefing session with our project manager on Saturday. It really isn’t worth coming home late on Saturday night and then driving straight back on Sunday.’
‘No, of course not,’ said Kate, swallowing her disappointment and trying to sound cheerful. For the last two weeks they had been planning to spend this weekend redecorating their own bedroom. With a big south-facing window opening on to a wrought-iron balcony it had panoramic views, but the wallpaper was covered with voluptuous roses in a particularly nauseating shade of maroon, on a background which had once been cream but had now darkened, like old varnish on an oil painting, to a dreary brown. The Hapgood sisters had used this room as an upstairs sitting room, and must have covered the walls with large paintings, which now showed like ghosts in rectangles of less faded paper. Across the walls the dark shapes of the roses seemed to Kate to crawl like spiders towards these brighter patches. The paint on the woodwork was dark brown and so old that it had turned dull and flaky. If you ran your hand along the window frame a powdery cascade fluttered to the floor, which was still uncarpeted.
‘You’ll be back Monday evening then, will you?’ said Kate, as casually as she could.
‘Should be. I might just have to stay over till Tuesday. Definitely no longer than that.’
Anyone else, Kate thought disconsolately as she replaced the receiver, might have suspected another woman in Tom’s life, but she knew that the other woman in their marriage was the job.
Once, Tom had been like any other young executive – keen to rise in his career, but expecting to work normal office hours. Evenings and weekends had been spent with Kate and his growing family, and when he closed the office door he closed his mind to the concerns of Crossbow Computers. Things had changed over the last four or five years. As he rose into top management, the job had consumed more and more of his life. It seemed to her that as unemployment rose during the recession, those still in jobs worked longer and longer hours.
Nowadays, Tom was never home before nine in the evening, and left again – at the latest – by half-past seven the following morning. Every night he brought home a fat briefcase full of papers, which he worked on until sleep rolled over him where he sat in his chair. Then Kate would carefully move the folder that was about to slip from his hand, turn off the lamp, and tiptoe off to bed. An hour or two later he would stumble upstairs and roll into bed beside her, complaining irritably that she shouldn’t have let him doze off, he needed to finish reading the report... and would plunge into sleep again before the sentence was finished.
She worried about his health. When they had first met, he was on the university tennis team and spent his weekends sailing. Now he seemed to regard the few minutes it took to walk to and from his car each day as a segment of wasted time. His talk about sailing, on the morning he left for Manchester, was no more than lip-service to an abandoned dream.
Once or twice she had said, ‘For heaven’s sake, Tom, give it a rest! The world won’t come to an end if you don’t brief yourself for seven meetings tomorrow. Can’t you delegate some of this?’
He would smile enigmatically and pretend to listen, but she knew that in his heart he was impervious to her appeals. Work had somehow become a drug which both excited and soothed him. She could not put her finger on the reason for it, did not think that she was in any way to blame, or the children. The frantic pressure seemed to come from that other world, where the pursuit of successful business deals had replaced the atavistic male need to display prowess as a hunter.
Kate spent a gloomy weekend. She had no energy even to walk Toby, but let him out into the drizzly garden instead. Roz was spending the weekend with her friend Angie in Charlborough, and Stephen had suddenly been seized by panic over his A Levels, and refused to stir from his room except for frequent raids on the fridge. On Sunday afternoon Beccy phoned – ‘Just for a chat,’ she said, but it soon became clear that she had spent all her money again and was angling for further funds. Kate tried to be strong.
‘You know we discussed all this before you went up to university last autumn, darling. We are giving you well over the equivalent of a full grant, and you said you could easily budget on that.’
‘I know, Mum, but I’ve had extra expenses. I have to pay my share when we all go to the pub, don’t I? And the last telephone bill for our flat was horrendous. It wasn’t me that was making all the long calls, or Pam – Debbie’s family is in Ireland, and Neil calls his girlfriend in London every single night – but we agreed we would split the phone bill four ways right at the start, and it’s difficult to go back on that now. And then the microwave blew up and we had to get a new one. That cost us over £200.’
Kate bit back the desire to point out that when she had been a student she had managed to survive without either a telephone or a microwave.
‘I didn’t want to ask you for more money,’ said Beccy virtuously, ‘but I’ve taken out the maximum student loan and they won’t let me have any more.’
‘Oh, Beccy! You promised you wouldn’t take out a loan. We don’t want you to get into debt.’
‘Well, I just had to, Mum,’ said Beccy icily. ‘What do you want me to do, go on the streets?’
I suppose it is our fault, thought Kate, as she hung up, having promised to transfer £300 to Beccy’s bank account on Monday morning. We have made life too easy for them, and they expect to have the same comforts in student life as they have at home.
Stephen grudgingly agreed to emerge from his room long enough to eat dinner on Sunday evening when Kate’s parents came up from their house on Castle Terrace, but he retreated as soon as the table was cleared.
‘Come on, Katie,’ said Howard. ‘We’ll give you a hand with the washing up. You’re looking a bit down tonight.’
Kate tried to shake off her gloom. ‘Just my awful family,’ she said ruefully. ‘Tom working himself into the ground, Roz moaning about missing London, Stephen refusing to help with anything around the house because of his exams, and now Beccy running out of money again.’
‘You should discipline them better,’ said Millicent crisply, tying on an apron and filling the sink with hot suds. ‘No, don’t put the dishes in the dishwasher, Howard. It doesn’t do the job properly. I’ll wash, you dry, and Kate can put away. She’s the only one who knows where anything goes in this new house.’
Her husband and daughter knew better than to argue with her.
‘Now I would never have let you get away with the nonsense you put up with from your children,’ said Millicent, efficiently soaping and rinsing the glasses and the cutlery. ‘Tell Beccy she must manage on the money she has until the end of term. She will just have to learn to do without things.’
‘Apparently they have all these bills for the flat...’
‘They should have budgeted properly, and put money aside for the bills.’
‘We’ll have a really serious talk with her over the summer,’ said Kate weakly.
‘Settling in, are you?’ asked Howard, firmly turning the subject. His years as a headmaster had taught him diplomacy. ‘We heard you met up with Linda again.’
Kate laughed. ‘Nothing ever remains a secret for long in Dunmouth, does it? I really admire all she’s done – taking a degree in her thirties, setting up this bookshop. She’s been so courageous after losing her husband.’
‘That’s Dan Wilson’s daughter for you. He was a grand chap.’
Millicent gave a dismissive toss of her head, which her family knew well.
‘I hope you aren’t going to get mixed up with the fisher folk, Kate.’
Kate took a deep breath and held it. She could feel the flush of anger rising up her neck, but she concentrated o
n stacking the plates in the oak dresser which had come with the house. When she turned around again she had herself under control. Howard winked at her.
‘Speaking of secrets,’ she said, ‘I had an odd experience on the beach the other day. I was right down at the far end of the sandy beach, near the headland, and this terrible feeling swept over me, but I couldn’t exactly remember... Did I have some sort of accident there when I was a child?’
Her parents exchanged a quick glance. She saw her mother’s back stiffen, and her father turned away, busy with the tea-towel. They did not answer her.
‘Wasn’t there an old cottage there?’ she went on, suddenly recalling. ‘Is it still standing?’
Millicent cut across her, ignoring what she had said. ‘When did you say Beccy would be coming home for the summer? Perhaps she should get a job, so she’ll have some money of her own for next year. I’ll ask around. Something nice and professional, like a dentist’s receptionist, or helping in the library.’
Kate recognised this technique of her mother’s. She would get no answer to her questions, which only made her the more curious. There had been a cottage there once, but the memory of it was also clouded by a sense of unease. She couldn’t remember seeing anything of it the other morning, but then she had been concerned with finding Toby, and disconcerted by her meeting with the odd, barefoot old woman fishing for crabs in the rock pool.
Howard and Millicent lingered after dinner in the half-furnished drawing room until Kate ached with weariness, longing for them to leave. The weekend felt as though it had gone on for ever. She saw her mother out to the car at last with relief. Glancing surreptitiously at her watch, she was surprised to find it was only half-past ten. Her father lingered on the doorstep, turning his hat in his hand.
‘That cottage, Katie,’ he said, speaking in a low voice, with his face turned away from the car, ‘I wouldn’t press your mother about that. There was a bad business went on there during the war. I only heard about it after I was demobbed. It was one of the young fishermen who was the ringleader, though somehow Millicent got caught up in it.’
‘But Mum is always so snobbish about the fisher folk!’
‘Ah well, I think that episode might have something to do with it. Scared her, I think. Not that I ever really got to the bottom of it. Best to leave well alone.’
‘But, Dad, why should that give me such a nightmarish feeling? I wasn’t born till three years after the war. You’re telling me I’m psychic?’
‘You probably heard something about it when you were a child. You know how children have their own folklore and like to scare each other with frightening stories.’ To Kate, he sounded evasive.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know... It seemed more immediate than that. But I’m probably just imagining things.’ She looked at him steadily. ‘Just answer my simple question, will you? Is that cottage still there?’
‘Yes, I believe so. I haven’t been along that far since my hip began to give me trouble.’
‘And does anyone live there?’
‘Some old woman, I believe. A bit of a recluse, so I’ve heard.’
An old, grey-haired woman, thought Kate, with eyes as bright and fearless as a herring gull, and long bony feet, brown with sun and sea-spray.
* * *
Tom returned home on Tuesday evening, and when he set out for work on Wednesday he was feeling pleased with what he had achieved in Manchester. It was a big project, worth £8 million, and things could have gone disastrously wrong if he hadn’t intervened himself. Young John Lindan, the project manager, was able and hard-working, but he lacked the seniority to put pressure on some of the consultants who had been brought in to carry out part of the system design, with the result that the milestones had begun to slip. Tom had worked out a new project plan, agreed it with the council, and explained in no uncertain terms to the consultants that he would be invoking the penalty clauses in their contracts if they failed to meet a single one of the revised deadlines.
The road he took every day to Banford turned away from the river and the sea within five minutes, and ten minutes later had topped the rising ground behind Dunmouth and dropped down to the inland plain behind. He had hoped, when they moved north, that he would be able to enjoy their nearness to the sea, but so far he had hardly seen it. He wanted to take up sailing again, first enjoyed during childhood holidays on the Isle of Wight and followed up enthusiastically at university (often when he should have been attending lectures). There was a tiny marina at one end of Dunmouth harbour. And between the castle and the beginning of Castle Terrace, just beyond the Castle Café, two local lads had recently started up a water sports centre in a refurbished redundant fish-shed. They hired out boats, surfboards and jet bikes to a few locals, and to visitors who came from Charlborough and other nearby towns. At the first opportunity, he promised himself, he would hire a dinghy and take Kate out sailing – something she had never done, despite growing up in Dunmouth.
She had looked at him sardonically when he had teased her about this.
‘You have to understand, Dunmouth has always been a working fishing port. Serious business. Men only. When I was a child, trippers in sailing dinghies would not have been welcome, particularly not female ones.’
Banford was a dreary town, Tom thought, as he entered the city limits. Its centre had been torn down and rebuilt in the sixties and seventies, and the office blocks and unimaginative shopping malls put up at that time were now disintegrating – bits of concrete flaking off, metal window frames buckling out of true, paint shabby and not maintained because the buildings could not last much longer. One office building had been sheathed in scaffolding more than two years ago, Tom had heard. Then the owners had run out of money. The scaffolding still stood, neglected and rusty, while pedestrians picked their way awkwardly around it.
Here on the outskirts, Banford was pleasanter. Concentric rings of thirties semi-detached houses surrounded the desecrated centre, each house with its substantial front garden. The local soil was favourable to roses, and when Tom had visited the town last summer these gardens had been a lush tangle of roses of every variety and hue. It was still too early for the roses this year, but the hedges were clipped, and the lawns tidy. It must have been a cosy sort of town once, he reflected. A bit claustrophobic, perhaps, an inland, inward-looking town, a mite complacent. But you knew where you were with Banford. Safe, decent, reliable. Though current crime statistics showed that life here was changing. Tom pulled his BMW into the senior executive space in the office car park, and locked the door carefully.
* * *
‘Is that you, István?’ his sister asked. She always began her telephone conversations with him in this way. The need for care, for reassurance, was the legacy of a childhood spent in terrifying times.
‘Magdolna? How are you? How’s József? And my scamp of a nephew?’
‘We’re all fine.’ He could hear the sound of cheerful voices and clinking glasses behind her. She must be ringing, as usual, from the village inn. ‘András skinned both knees when he fell off his bike on the way to school yesterday. Went about all day without washing them, so I had to pick out the bits of grit when he came home. It must have been very painful, but he just bit his lip and said he could be as brave as his grandfather.’
There was something about her tone, something in the way she spoke of their father, that alerted him, but he went carefully.
‘I’m looking forward to my long weekend with you.’
‘Ye-es.’ She drew the word out. ‘There’s something I want to show you, something József and I have found.’ Her voice was tight with caution.
‘Yes?’ He sounded casual, relaxed.
‘Yes.’ She paused, and he could hear her hurried breathing. ‘I think perhaps Mama must have hidden it. At the end.’
His interest quickened, but he kept his voice easy.
‘Where did you find it?’
‘You know that I’m getting that new kiln? Large enough to fir
e my bigger pieces, so I don’t have to risk sending them away?’
‘Yes, you told me about it last time I was down, and showed me the picture in the catalogue.’
‘Well, it’s arrived, and József thought the wooden floor wouldn’t be strong enough to take the weight. He decided to build a concrete base for it, and that meant taking up one end of the floor.’
‘So that’s where you found...it? Under the floor of the barn you use for your workshop?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Sounds interesting. You can tell me all about it when I arrive. I should be with you by seven tomorrow evening.’ He was intrigued. Magdolna must be very excited about her find, whatever it was, or she would never have rung him. She distrusted the privacy of telephone lines, suspecting that even today, in times of freedom, the Ávó might still be tapping them. She probably did not want to be overheard by neighbours in the bar either.
‘We’re looking forward to seeing you. András wants you to go fishing with him.’
After she had rung off, István tapped his desk thoughtfully with his brass paperknife. That reference to their father had seemed deliberate. Something Mama had hidden in 1956... He felt a sudden spurt of excitement. On his desk stood a photograph of his parents, laughing, dishevelled, in military boots and camouflage trousers, taken a few months after he had been born. For years he had had to conceal it, but now it was framed and in full view.
What could his sister and her husband have unearthed?
* * *
On Thursday morning Kate woke early and lay watching a silvery band of light probing between the curtains and falling across the chair where her clothes lay folded. Cautiously she raised herself on her elbow and looked at the clock. A quarter to six. Tom was breathing heavily, lying deeply asleep and sprawled half across her part of the bed. She drew the edge of her nightdress carefully from under his arm. He looked exhausted, but had laughed at her suggestion, last night, that he might take a day off on Friday or Monday, to make up for the time spent working in Manchester the previous weekend.