by Lee, Tanith
Cheta and Carlo stood on the slope, saying nothing, doing nothing, their blank faces and bloomed-over eyes quite fixed. She had gambled they would not make a scene before the van driver and his spouse, and she had been right.
The facility of her escape went to Rachaela’s head. She got in at the front next to Rene, who was instructed to ‘squash up’ on the long seat. The van man shut the van and came around to fill up the cab.
It would not be a comfortable journey, but she had never thought it would be.
‘Longish drive,’ said the van man. ‘Have to ask you for a fiver. It’s the extra weight and the petrol,’ he explained rather sheepishly, bulging Rene and Rachaela almost off the seat.
Rachaela looked back from the open window as the van started. She saw Carlo, the great cans in both hands, bowed and leaning forward, staring after her as she was borne away. Growing smaller.
The van man and his wife talked incessantly during the drive. Rene asked Rachaela to close the window, and the van became hot and stuffy, dense with the smell of groceries and washing powder. Behind them things bumped and shifted like ogres balancing in the back.
‘There go those Knight’s Castile. I told you they wasn’t properly secure,’ said Rene.
Their accents were not local, but London, like a signpost, perhaps.
Rachaela tried to keep her mind set on what she was doing, but the flight had made her queasy and excited, and the constant chat and questions distracted and wore her out.
‘And I could just fancy a nice bit of silverside for dinner,’ said the van man, at intervals.
‘It’s fishfingers or go without,’ snapped Rene each time. ‘You don’t mind me saying,’ she said to Rachaela, ‘but they must be a funny old lot at that house. You working there?’
‘That’s right,’ said Rachaela.
‘Must be a real pain, stuck off up there. What do you do, then?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean what work they got you doing?’
‘I’m typing a book,’ said Rachaela, at random.
‘Oh God, you don’t mean to say they do books.’
‘Memoires.’
‘Oh, memoires.’
How much did they know of the house? Not much.
‘Odd to see servants, i’nt it? This day and age. Who’d do a job like that? Demeaning. Just two or three old ducks and them servants running round.’
A cow passed in a field, only one, and not a house in sight.
‘See that cow? I could just fancy a bit of silverside.’
‘It’s fishfingers or go without.’
Eventually the desolation of the countryside was filled by villages, not derelict and malign like the place of dead cars, but quite pretty, with gardens and ivy in baskets, washing, here and there a swing or a child on a lawn playing with a dog.
The fields were sown, neat and kempt, with windbreaks of tall trees. Hedgerows lined the road which had changed to something broader. After an hour, now and then a car passed them, and once a country bus.
At length a broad highway received them. Houses followed the road, stone, but also plaster and pebbledash, bright red front doors, driveways with motorbikes.
‘What road do you want?’ asked the van driver.
‘Just the town centre.’
‘We don’t go there,’ said Rene quickly.
‘I’ll let you off at Market Street,’ said the van man, ‘it’s simple enough from there.’
She paid them their fiver and the van pulled up in a wide, ordinary street, dominated at one end by a high, brown cathedral tower.
‘Just go towards the church,’ said the van man, whom Rene had never liked enough to name aloud. ‘Glad to get a bit of time to yourself. See some new faces.’
‘Yes.’
Rachaela got out, her heavy bag, holding all necessities, on her shoulder. She stood bewildered in the street as the blue van closed like a clam and made off up the road. ‘Well she was a funny one.’
‘Not much to say for herself.’
‘Close-mouthed bit.’
‘I could just eat a bit of silverside.’
‘Fishfingers.’
The plan was straightforward. To reach this town, and from here to retreat to London. There was nothing to stay for, everything to avoid. It was true that London posed problems, for nothing was secure there, no flat, no job, money in a state of levitation. But it was what she knew. It was away from the Scarabae.
She had been crazy to come anywhere near them.
And the first part of the plan had worked better than hoped for. For the van driver might have refused her, or Cheta and Carlo seized her like warders.
So, she was free.
Free, and here.
Rachaela felt agoraphobic, almost afraid. The street, the town, were now alien. She had been shut up so long in the coloured dark of the house, only the sea and the heath for exercise.
The street was long, and over its sides crowded other roofs going uphill.
People hurried by with baskets and carriers and prams. Cars drove to and fro.
There was a sensation of movement in all directions, as if the ground shifted underfoot.
It would be incredibly stupid to be influenced by any of that.
Rachaela began to walk towards the tower of the cathedral or church.
There were shops, and crowds on the pavement. A child screamed and a chocolate bar went skidding by her foot. ‘Sammy I told you!’
The street turned and gave on another. The tower canted aside. It was on the left now, and no route through.
Rachaela nerved herself. She must ask the way. At the centre of the town information would be available.
‘Excuse me. How do I reach the church from here?’
The woman looked at her as if she were an imbecile. ‘Just go down there and then across and up.’
‘Thank you.’
Rachaela crossed the road and took to a tiny alley. The crowd pushed up the alley against her, overtaking her. A minuscule post office offered picture postcards of the town. Two or three off-season visitors pondered the cards, congesting the alley further.
Rachael emerged. There was a zebra-crossing and a street running uphill. The tower and pieces of the church roof appeared over houses.
The crowd wandered, and shoved.
‘And I said to him you’ll have to hang it.’
‘What does he expect.’
Unlike the van people, the town had its accent. Perhaps Rene and the beef-fancier had lived here years, still ostracized as foreigners.
The street ended in a public library, grey stone and firmly shut. The street ran both ways below the church tower which was partly hidden again by intervening roofs.
Rachaela turned to the left and walked along the street. The shops were quaint here with bow windows and jolly holiday wares, painted milk jugs and carved animals, and the first crop of Easter eggs.
A policeman idled along the road. Rachaela mistrusted uniforms but that too would be stupid. She was lucky to find him.
‘Excuse me.’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘Is it possible to get a train from here to London?’
‘Why no, madam. You’d need to change at Fleasham,’ she was sure he said fleas, ‘and then at Poorly, on to the London line. Not a very regular service, I’m afraid.’
Who after all would wish to leave here for a spot like London?
The other station by which she had arrived would have been easier, only one change involved, but it was out in the wilds and she suspected, being unable to give them directions, no car firm would locate it successfully. Unless she found the original car firm which had picked her up, and she could not recall seeing their name. Besides, the Scarabae might assume she would attempt that station. They might send someone to intercept her, as once before. Here, there were the crowds, the out-of-season holidaymakers.
Her eye went back to the Easter eggs. Would it soon be spring? Would spring provide a camouflage?
‘I can, madam. But I can tell you, too, there’s no train connection at Fleasham to Poorly today. Not until Friday.’
Dare she ask him what day it was? No.
‘Where is the station, anyway?’
‘Top of Wagon Street. Over the river from St Bees.’ She was sure too he said Bees, as if all the names here were toytown names, designed to confuse and ridicule.
‘And that’s the church, there.’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘I’ve been trying to get to the church.’ Did it matter now? Yes, she must find her bearings.
‘You go down there, take a left at The Baker’s Arms and you’ll come to it directly.’
‘Thank you.’
She did not believe him.
But he might watch her, and so she set off the prescribed way.
The manner in which he spoke of ‘Friday’ indicated a long wait. Surely the van would not visit the desolate village on a Sunday, day of rest? Nameless murmurs of a beef dinner were cravings, not symptoms of a Sunday lunch. Was it Monday then? The crowd was thick, female and male, and often sluggish, and it was by now one o’clock, early afternoon. Saturday?
She reached The Baker’s Arms, a pub of crocodile green from the interior of which fruit machines flickered. A narrower road, tree-lined, led out into a cobbled square. It seemed likely. She went down it. At the street’s end the square spread out, rimmed by even quainter, cuter shops bursting with curiosities and furry toys.
The church-cathedral faced modernity across the cobbles, a brown-and-molasses structure pocked by carving and warted by gargoyles who leaned precariously towards the earth from their heights.
Across the square stood a hotel. It was too smart and would cost too much, but it made her think along the proper lines. She must find shelter, until the day of the train.
That was settled then, her plan augmented but not broken.
At four o’clock Rachaela had located a small hotel which offered bed and breakfast. It lay in a warren of streets behind the church, a whitewashed Georgian building, joined to others, another symbol of her goal: London. She was, by the time she found it, at the end of her tether. Empty of food, tired beyond belief, she sank on the lean little bed and lay with her eyes shut.
She would have to go out again for anything to eat. They had refused her a sandwich; only breakfasts were presented in the rooms between seven-thirty and nine.
Already the dark was coming, the glittery day closing itself in leaden cloud.
From her window, Rachaela could see a yard, drainage pipes, a window opposite veiled in white curtain, which obviously gave the same view as her own—yard, pipes, window.
That was immaterial. She had found out the day from the hotel register. It was Tuesday. Only two days then of this. Then the train to Fleasham and so to Sickly or Poorly or whatever, and the capital. Where she must lose herself for ever to the Scarabae, with their eccentric intimate burnings of corpses on the shore. Lose herself to the man who claimed to be her father, whose own black fire had seared her, set her running.
She tried to breathe more easily, her chest was so tight it was sore.
No longer excited.
But there was nothing to fear.
How could they find her? She had muddled even herself, twisting and turning about the ghastly town, asking in shops, sitting down once in a café but unable to drink the tea or eat the bun.
She must calm herself. She had succeeded.
Nothing to fear.
She went out at eight o’clock, entered the little café down the street, ordered an omelette and chips and was able, with the glass of wine, to eat some of it.
Rachaela did not want to return to the featureless cramped room but she had no choice. Neither did she want to wander again the peopled town.
There were floodlights on the church—St Bees—by night. The cars had white eyes flashing and ducking. The inhabitants and the visitors walked about, laughing and gesticulating.
She was in another country.
She had forgotten what the world was like.
What had he said? The house is my prison. Two years out of my prison and I hated them... I needed to go back to earth.
But she did not want the prison of the house.
No.
She had left all her books behind, but two. Her choice had been profligate, frantic. Books that meant something, difficult to get hold of, perhaps the wrong choices. She might in the future be able to prize her abandoned possessions from the Scarabae. Or would they incarcerate those, lacking her? Surely she would never have any contact with the family again.
What had truly caused her to run?
Sylvian, or Adamus? Or some other, more insidious thing?
The lamps would be alight now, and the candles.
Anna and Stephan would be dining. Fricassee of seagull. A gift despite everything, the bird Eric had dropped in Sylvian’s pyre—they might have eaten it.
What would Anna and Stephan say?
Rachaela is gone.
Had she smitten them a terrible blow?
She would not think of them.
Rachaela went back to her room at the small hotel.
The bathroom was down the hall but she had been told, at this time of year, there were no other guests, she would have it to herself.
She ran a bath. She shaved her body and washed her hair, worried all the while that someone would come knocking, despite the reassurance.
Finally she washed out her underclothes and took them back to her room to dry.
The central heating in the room was tepid.
She got into bed. She was cold.
It began to rain on the town, and she was glad. All those pub crawls and pizza suppers spoiled by a dousing. The sound of wet cars slashing through puddles came ceaselessly.
At midnight she heard the church clock chime.
The clock agreed with her watch, and this was Tuesday. In the mirror over the chest she might see herself.
She lay coiled into the foetal position, shivering in the icy bed.
Sleep well.
In the morning the dustmen woke her, crashing and bellowing at the front of the hotel.
It was seven-thirty.
She got up and dressed, and at eight a grudging breakfast, rolls and warm coffee, was brought to her by a pasty, lipsticked girl.
Even warm, the coffee was a pleasure. Yes, it was.
Now, what to do with her day.
She could hide, of course, like a spy in a novel, but the thought now of a further ten or so hours cloistered in this bedroom brought her to the point of mild hysteria. Besides, they would want to do the room, and anticipated that guests would absent themselves.
She must absent herself.
Rachaela put the heavier articles from her bag into the chest drawer. Her toothbrush and paste, her cosmetics and other items stood along its top like toy soldiers. She fought off the urge to take everything with her.
Outside the day was grey and yellow. Umbrellas marched on the pavements. There was no lessening of the crowd, men with shoppers and women with pushchairs, babies zipped in polythene environments, staring with contempt at the buffeted and unprotected adults they were due to become.
Rachaela walked carefully, trying to hold a half-formed map in her head.
She went into the shops, and inspected fifty-year-old antiques, woolly coats, blue ducks with flowers on their backs.
At lunch-time she went into a snack bar and ate a dry salad with drier ham. But she had not tasted ham in some while. It was salty, fatty. She had forgotten ham was like that.
At sea. It was all right. Only today, and one more day, and then she could take the train.
She should try to find the station. Behind the church, over the river, Wagon Street. She had memorized the address of the hotel and could find her way back.
There were Roman remains in the town. She had looked for them vaguely, and not found them.
The station was more important.
She got to the river, wide and yellow-grey as the sky. Boats went up and down, slick and trim or rusted and moribund. A bridge humped over the river, and beyond, the streets sprawled and flared into and out of each other. She asked the way twenty times. It was certain, there were those in the town who sent you on a wild-goose chase. Baiting an alien.
Finally, at a quarter to four, she came into Wagon Street and saw the brick and iron façade of the station like El Dorado.
She hurried up and went inside. It was very clean and plastic, with litter bins, and lavatories labelled in the London way, the woman with only one leg.
No one in the ticket office. No one on the wide windy platform where the darkness now began to fold its wings.
At last she knocked on a ‘Staff Only’ door. But nobody answered.
It was as if the station was a sop, merely. A ploy to prove it was feasible to get away, but inoperative in fact. Who would wish to leave?
No trains went through along the shiny tracks. No lights changed. The lavatories did not flush and the litter bins were devoid of mess.
Never mind. The station existed. It was there, and could be used. On Friday she would come very early, before eight, foregoing her lukewarm breakfast if need be. She would wait and if she had to, she would question the driver of every train that stopped. Fleasham, Poorly. The great sightless, careless city that sucked one in and buried one. To be buried. That was it.
Rachaela made her way back cautiously from the phantom station. The sun was setting in a slum of cloud.
On the streets the umbrellas still glided.
She was lost three times before she reached the street with the hotel. Nevertheless she reached it.
Her possessions were in place, her bed had been made with mindless starched precision, and tucked in like a straightjacket.
She had jettisoned Wednesday.
Now there was only the evening, the night, Thursday.
She could cope with those.
At the house, they would be lighting the lamps.
They were carrying him down to the beach. There were no steps, but a long slope. Carlo and Michael had him between them. Camillo walked behind, his long white hair dancing on his shoulders. Alice had a mouse in her hat.
‘You mustn’t cry,’ Anna said to her.