‘So, with Vernon’s bloody rags abandoned in the ditch, and the body disposed of, you returned to Oaklands Hall and packed your belongings in order to leave forthwith?’
She nodded. ‘I had committed fratricide. How could I stay, and inherit, after what I had done?’
‘Especially,’ Holmes remarked, ‘when your brother’s body, weighted down by the stone that killed him, reposed in the lake on the Oaklands estate.’
She stared at him. ‘So you know everything?’
‘Not quite,’ my friend said, with a low chuckle that took me unawares. ‘For instance, I am as yet unsure precisely how Mark Meade will explain his short absence to Sir Greville when he returns to resume his duties at the Hall this evening. I am, however, sure that this is a conundrum which will also soon be solved.’
She looked bewildered, as if unable to believe her ears. ‘Mr Holmes, I… I don’t know what to say.’
My friend waved a hand towards a Steinway piano on the far side of the sitting room. ‘Do not trouble yourself with words, above all not with words of gratitude. You have rescued me from boredom, and thus I am in your debt, not vice versa. But the London train does not leave Chester for another hour. While we wait, would you care to indulge me for a few minutes with a little Chopin?’
Ann Cleeves
* * *
Mud
* * *
I was walking along the riverbank close to my home in the border town of Berwick, when the smell of the shore caught at the back of my throat and took me back forty years. Suddenly I was a schoolgirl again, on the bank of another estuary, in another small town in a rural county close to the sea. I’d walked along the Tweed many times before without the same experience, but perhaps not at this particular point in the tide or in the early summer. In any event what happened then was dramatic, a revelation. This was a Proust moment. The snapping of time. It was almost hallucinatory in its clarity. All at once I was a teenage girl, on my way to school, and the smell of inter-tidal mud provided the background to my dreams. My head was full of colour and romance and the sun was warm on the back of my neck.
I should have welcomed the magic that swept me back in time and allowed a few minutes to lose myself in the daydream. I should have found a quiet bench and sat there, a middle-aged woman smiling gently to herself. I should have breathed in that unique smell of salt and earth and rotting vegetation and remembered warm kisses, tunes played on cheap guitars, friends dressed in cheesecloth and denim. Instead I shut the memories out. I continued walking, picked up my pace and strode up the hill to the town. I got into my car and drove home.
But even here on the edge of a hill and miles from the river, the stink stays in my nostrils. I make a pot of strong coffee to dispel it, I drink strong red wine, but still the smell remains. Despite myself I sit in the dusk with the lights switched off and run the story of that summer in my head.
Every term time weekday I’d walk along the River Taw in North Devon to school. I’d get the bus from the coastal village where my father was the village headmaster into town and then stroll through the park to the Grammar School. The path is still there. I dropped in when I was in the region on business last year. But even then, with the river just yards away from me, I didn’t have this experience, this vivid re-working of an old narrative.
Usually I made the walk alone, certainly in that year, at the end of my lower sixth. I had plenty of friends, but considered myself something of a poet and the solitary wander along the river was a statement, a signal to the others that I needed time alone to think. What poseurs we were! Sometimes the tide was full and with a westerly wind behind it the water was blown almost onto the footpath. Sometimes the river was hardly more than a trickle and the mud was baked in the sun. Then the salt marsh seemed to spread for miles right past the Long Bridge and out to the sea. It was marked by stranded small boats and the footprints of gulls and rats.
The sea played an important part in our social lives. Now Croyde and Woolacombe are famous as places to surf. Rich boys from London turn up with their fancy tents or they rent apartments in the big seafront houses and the roads are blocked by expensive cars. Everywhere you hear the loud, public school voices. When I was a girl the beaches belonged to us, to the kids who lived in the villages. At weekends and during holidays, we worked in the pubs and became waitresses and chambermaids, but the trippers, the grockels as we knew them, played no real part in our lives, except to stress how much we belonged. The visitors then came as families, and when the screaming children were dragged off to bed, we took over, skinny-dipping at midnight and building bonfires on the sand.
It seems to me now that we had more energy than anyone has a right to. We drank too much and read everything we could get our hands on, made music and sat for hours by firelight discussing love and friendship. We believed that nobody had felt so deeply. And into this mix came our leader, our guru, a small dark Northerner called Davie Raynor. Mr Raynor we knew him as, at first, because he was a teacher, a newly qualified teacher of Drama and English. But it became Davie when we were out of school because he was hardly older than we were. He lived in a flat on the coast not far from my home. Soon he turned up to our parties and sang Dylan with a guitar in his hands, sitting by the fire on the beach.
Towards the end of the school year, once exams were over, most of the lower sixth left to work in bars or hotels, but Davie Raynor had plans for our little group. He’d like to stage a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, he said. Brecht was a favourite. We’d have time to workshop it properly if we stayed on until the official end of term. Were we willing to do that? Of course we were. Even the boys were a little in love with him. He came from County Durham and his dad worked in a coalmine. He was strong and hard and none of us had ever met anyone like him before.
He held auditions at lunchtime in the school hall. There was a smell of rubber gym mat and floor polish. We pulled benches into a rough circle and he passed out scripts. He asked me to read for Grusha, the central character:
‘Go on, Jen, give it a go.’ Speaking in that strange, tight accent that set him apart.
I was considered one of the better actresses in our year, but I didn’t think I had a chance. I knew where Davie’s affections lay. He was besotted by Nell Pengelly, skinny, dark-eyed Nell with her long straight hair and her air of abstracted and silent concentration. He had never said anything about the infatuation, but he didn’t have to. Occasionally I’d see him staring across a classroom at her and then forcing himself to look away. I knew he’d want Nell as his leading lady.
In fact he gave the part of Grusha to someone else entirely. Margaret Hill wasn’t part of our group. Her father was a doctor and she lived in the town. She’d only remained in school after the exams because she didn’t need the money that a holiday job would provide. Margaret was the sort of pupil that most teachers loved – she taught Sunday school, liked classical music and wore sensible shoes. She was captain of the house hockey team. God, how we despised her for all those things! Now I think she must have been rather brave to stand against the flow of the tide, but there was something smug about her that would have irritated me even as an adult. It wasn’t her common sense and responsibility but the unquenchable belief that she was always right.
So Margaret became Grusha and the rest of us took other parts. We lived and breathed the production. Even when we were away from school, we planned and rehearsed it. It must have been a magnificent summer for Mr Raynor. These articulate young people brimming with ideas and enthusiasm. And always, just on the edge of his vision, always in his mind, the beautiful Nell. A temptation and a thrilling possibility. Because she was aware of his admiration and the attraction was reciprocal. Nell was too passive to make the first move, but we knew that she’d respond if he approached her. As I said, we were all a little in love with Davie Raynor. During that long, dry summer it was as if the rest of us were holding our breaths, waiting for the drama to play out.
It happened after the dress rehea
rsal. We’d been working all day, painting details onto the set and printing the tickets, running through the songs. Mr Raynor was teaching and wasn’t free until the end of school. As we ran through the production I saw how well it had all come together. Margaret was very good as Grusha, better than Nell or I would have been. She had an earthy, solid presence. We would have been too slight, too fey. We were performing in the round in the same hall where the auditions had been held. I sat on the floor, acting as prompt, though nobody forgot their lines that afternoon. We were showing off for Mr Raynor. The audience of parents and teachers on the following evenings would mean less to us than his approval.
Afterwards he offered Nell and me a lift home. Nell lived in my village. Her mother made pots in a shed at the end of their garden and her father was a writer of some sort. They’d only moved to North Devon three years before, but they were well accepted. We were accustomed to arty families moving in from outside. Davie stopped the car right outside our house. It was a school house, built in the playground. Tied accommodation, my father called it. We were saving for our own place, but teachers were paid very poorly in those days. I expected Davie to drive on to the cottage where Nell lived, but instead he turned to her.
‘I’ll walk you down, shall I?’ he said. ‘I could do with some exercise.’
Nell said nothing. She just nodded and followed him. I walked as slowly as I could across the yard, past the climbing frame where I’d played as a child, stopping every now and then to watch their progress down the lane. It was still light, but the shadows were very long and the sun was low over the sea. They seemed to be talking intensely and they walked just a little way apart, his stocky body and her slender one, moving almost in step. When I went to bed sometime later, his car was still parked outside our house.
On the bus to school the next day I asked her what had happened.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing much. We talked.’
The younger kids on the bus were wired because it was the last week of term. The noise was ridiculous and stuff was being thrown, bags turned upside down, there were small scuffles. It was impossible to have a reasonable conversation. In town I pulled her with me to school along the path by the river, my arm in hers. The last thing I wanted that day was privacy. ‘You have to tell me everything,‘ I said.
‘Really,’ she said, with her little smile. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘But he kissed you? He must have kissed you.’
‘We have to be discreet.’ Those weren’t her words. I could hear Davie Raynor’s flinty accent as she spoke them.
But they can’t have been discreet enough because by the next day news of their relationship was common knowledge, in the sixth form common room at least. I don’t know how it got out. I only told a few of my closest friends.
Margaret must have got word of it. I can see her now in the common room, a prefab hut furnished with cast-off easy chairs and scratched tables. She was making herself tea. Most of us drank coffee but she’d brought in her own teapot. Whenever I remember her she was on her own, surrounded it seemed by an invisible wall. The rest of us hugged and touched, but nobody went within two feet of her. She frowned as she stirred the pot and as she rinsed a mug under the tap.
‘But they can’t be going out together,’ she said. ‘He’s a teacher. It’s wrong.’
‘Fancy him yourself, do you?’ one of the boys shouted. His face was hidden by the NME he was reading and the words seemed to come from nowhere.
Suddenly Margaret blushed furiously and I saw that there was some truth in the suggestion. She dreamed about Davie Raynor at night. After all he’d chosen her, picked her out as his leading lady. And while we teased or ignored her, he was always gentle and courteous. Margaret didn’t answer and the others were all too busy sniggering to notice her reaction. It would never occur to them that she might fancy anyone.
The play ran for three nights to full houses. It received a glowing review in the North Devon Journal. Margaret was marked out for special notice and I couldn’t help feeling a stab of envy when I read the praise. Of course we’d planned a party for our final night. We were all aware that something special was coming to an end. The next academic year would be different; there would be A-levels and university interviews. We would make one more step towards growing up and becoming responsible, boring. We’d be constrained by the curriculum. But for a few more weeks we were free to be unruly in our ideas and our deeds. To drink too much cheap wine and believe that we would remain friends forever.
We chose Anchor Woods for the site of the party. On the south side of the estuary it was close enough to town for people who lived in the centre to walk home. I’d arranged to spend the night with a friend who lived close by. I don’t know what plans Nell and Davie had made. We walked in a straggling, laughing gang across the timber yard and down the bank through the trees to the salt marsh, our bags clanking with the bottles we carried. The tide was out and there was driftwood to build a fire. Someone started to sing songs from Chalk Circle and we all joined in.
Davie sat next to Nell, his hand on her leg, all thought of discretion, it seemed, forgotten. In the firelight their faces glowed. Margaret was there too. Davie had insisted that we invite her:
‘You can’t leave her out, pet. She was the star. Besides, it’s not fair to exclude her.’
And so I’d invited her, thinking that she’d refuse or that her parents, so strict and religious, would never agree to her attending, but somehow she’d wangled it because she was there, holding a plastic glass of Spanish white in both hands. It provided me with some amusement to think that she’d never drunk much before and that she’d probably throw up in her tidy, little girl’s bedroom. What would her parents make of that?
Sometime later in the evening she wandered over and sat next to me. She still had a full glass of wine in her hands, but perhaps she’d been nursing the same one for most of the evening. Perhaps she was more sober than I was. It was hard to tell. She looked across the fire at Davie and Nell.
‘It’s wrong,’ she said, frowning as she had in the common room. ‘A betrayal of trust.’
‘She’s sixteen,’ I said. ‘Nearly seventeen. It’s perfectly legal.’
‘That’s hardly the point.’ She seemed suddenly horrified. ‘So you think they’re having sex? What if she gets pregnant?’
‘Oh,’ I said, sounding more wise and experienced than was actually the case. I had never got close to sleeping with a boy. ‘I think they’re both too sensible to let that happen, don’t you?’
‘It’s wrong,’ she said again. There was that stubborn insistence that she held the moral high ground. ‘Someone should know.’ She got to her feet as if she were about to stride off now to find a person in authority, the headmaster perhaps, to tell him that Nell Pengelly was being exploited by her teacher and that she needed rescuing. And perhaps at that point she did plan to rush home and surprise her parents with this interesting information. A gift to them to distract them from the fact that she’d been drinking, that her neat clothes were stained with marsh grass and bonfire ash. Her father was a school governor. He paraded with the teachers in his academic gown at speech day. I could see that this would end as a nightmare for Davie Raynor. He would be forced to leave the school and our life there the following year would be poorer and more boring.
‘You can’t do that,’ I said quietly. ‘Think about it. If Davie is forced out of his job everyone will work out who is to blame. Your life will be impossible.’
I saw at once that this was the wrong tack to take. Margaret would like to consider herself a martyr. It would please her to think that she’d sacrificed any popularity she might have had to save Nell Pengelly’s soul. So my words just made her more stubborn.
The fire had died down now and it was quite dark. The only light came from the moon. In the shadows couples were sitting together, kissing, laughing. One pair was out on the mud, dancing very slowly to a tune that only they could hear. Margaret looked around
her.
‘It was a mistake to come,’ she said. ‘I’m going home.’ She turned sharply and stumbled. It seemed she was a little drunk after all.
‘You can’t go on your own. You won’t find your way through the trees without a torch.’ Had I made my plan even then? Had I dreamed out the whole scenario in the seconds before the words left my mouth? Surely not. Sitting in my house on the hill, I convince myself that there was no plan, that what happened that night was all a dreadful mistake. ‘I’ll come with you,’ I said. ‘At least as far as the bridge. We can walk along the shore. But let’s finish our drinks before we leave.’
She looked at the wine in her plastic glass and drank it in one go, wrinkling her nose as if it were medicine. Then I took her arm, as I’d taken Nell’s on the path on the opposite bank of the river, and we walked quietly away. Nobody saw us leave. Everyone was too absorbed, too determined to squeeze the last drops of pleasure from the evening.
The tide was on the turn. Margaret was a town girl. She came to school along pavements, or more often her mother gave her a lift in her car. She didn’t understand the river or the estuary as well as I did. And her last gulp of wine had tipped her into intoxication. She couldn’t imagine the water seeping into the channels in the marsh, slipping like oil over the mud, covering the sand. She saw the lights of the Long Bridge in the distance and thought if she headed for those she’d be safe. Safer than scrambling through the trees of Anchor Wood in the dark. Her parents would have warned her about being out alone and the woods were close to a council estate, where unsuitable, even dangerous people might live. The moon over the mud seemed to mark a path for us to follow.
Best Eaten Cold and Other Stories Page 16