Cough, cough, cough.
‘She says her daughter was seen in the village yesterday. Mrs Smith told her. She shouted at her that Jessica, or Jez, as she calls her, was back. She thought Jessica might have come straight here, although why anyone should think that, I don’t know either. Apparently everyone in the hairdresser’s thinks she’s back, so it’s definite.’
Sarah only heard that Jessica was back.
‘So maybe now I’ll get the whole story,’ Andrew said. ‘Like I haven’t before. I thought I might put her in the kitchen, on account of redecorations, which are pretty obvious, what with all that carpet outside. God knows why she wouldn’t let me go to her, but she insisted. And perhaps you can sit in the scullery and eavesdrop. She’s due in fifteen minutes.’
They seemed to know one another very well; the instant recognition of strangers on a train, but the understanding was not yet entirely accurate. Sarah was cleaning the paintbrush against a wall, getting rid of the surplus, putting the lid on the tin of paint.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t keep still, you see. I tell you what, you get the whole story, then you tell me tomorrow. I’ve got to go.’
Jessica’s come home. She’s safe. Glory be.
Sarah hurried uphill.
How did they pass news around here? Where was the conduit, the river running through it? Or was news confined to tiny cliques that did not impinge on one another, did they e-mail and text rather than speak out loud? How could you earn true disgrace around here, since no one seemed either to notice or care what anyone did? Was the church, with its diminutive congregation, the only place for making actual announcements? She was racing back up the street, thinking Jessica’s come home, she might be at my house, she said she would come back after dark, and if she was here yesterday, where did she go? Mummy owns lots of houses. Is Mummy playing double bluff, and why didn’t I stay and listen?
It was suddenly colder, the sun forgotten, the clouds gathering, rain imminent. Sarah hurried out into the street, pulling her hood over her head, giving out the don’t-talk-to-me signal to the two single pedestrians she met going uphill before she was level with the butcher’s. The school bus created a traffic jam by depositing a dozen children who ran away in the thin veins of roads and houses leading off, clutching mobile phones and screaming insulting goodbyes.
Jessica would be there, listening out for seagulls, or in the kitchen, chopping herbs, ready to tell the truth. Sarah had such a conviction of this that she wanted to call out her name. It was darkening, mid-afternoon on a spring day and it felt like the middle of the night. She hesitated outside the butcher’s shop, but it was relatively full, three or four people in there, ordering, talking, delaying departure against the rain, Sam holding forth, gesturing, with a knife in his hand. Sam, a seducer of innocence, or merely a public figure it was fun to accuse? She waved as she went by: Sam was too busy to notice, but Jeremy did and waved back extravagantly, motioning her to come in, come in. She shook her head and carried on. That was the place, the only place, where the real business of talking was done. That would be the place for announcements and news, far more effective than church.
She checked her mobile phone. No word from Jessica, Jessie, Jezebel, Jez.
The rain was coming down by the time Sarah unlocked her door, giving way to the temptation to call out, ‘Jess? Are you there?’ The instinct to shout born of nothing but nights of bad dreams about her.
Silence in here. No messages, no response to the number she rang. This person is unavailable.
But all the same, someone had been here.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘My daughter wrecked my life,’ Celia Hurly said to the vicar of Pennyvale. ‘But that’s what children do, don’t they?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘Being gay, I’m not likely, etc.’ He always mumbled around her; he did it a lot, especially when she was drinking the bottle of wine he had hoped to share with someone else and determined to resist himself, so that he could remember every detail in order to repeat it verbatim. How strange and oddly unchristian to be eavesdropping by proxy.
‘Rubbish, Andrew Sullivan, you’ll know all about having daughters and sons one day, probably, you’re scarcely forty. I’ve seen how you really like the children. One day you’ll know. I was over forty when she arrived.’
Celia Hurly was one of those women who believed that homosexuality was a curable aberration, which amused Andrew, although she was a little more accurate than she knew. He smiled the beatific smile he could always call up to order, reached forward and touched her knee, every inch the safe, solicitous parson. He disliked her for blaming her daughter for wrecking her life: that simply was not fair. As far as he was concerned, children were an enhancement to life, a piece of glorious good luck and a privilege, however they turned out. It made him disposed to pity the mysterious Jessica Hurly, whereas he certainly had not done so before now, even if he did have reason to thank her.
‘So explain,’ he said. ‘I’m listening.’
He was trying to recall what on earth Celia usually talked about; something and nothing, never anything intimate. Parish affairs, flowers for the church, criticisms of the living and more of the dead, the agony of life with an errant husband and the loneliness of her own disgraceful widowhood. And then she would surprise him with something she had noticed, give him money for the children, to be used anonymously. She rarely mentioned Jessica, an awkward subject, best avoided. He had not lied when he had said there was goodness there.
‘A sweet, spoiled child, untimely ripped from her mother’s womb, like bloody Macduff. I still bear the scars. She took so long to arrive – God knows we tried hard enough, and then when she did arrive, she wasn’t a boy and she left my body a wreck. He didn’t want me after that, only her. All I was good for was cooking for them both. Christ, like mother, like daughter, hey? She grew up to be just like me.’
Celia handed him a crumpled photograph on paper. He smoothed it out on the kitchen table and saw a girl in a swim-suit, standing on a shingle beach, holding aloft a fish. A man hovered in the background. There was no resemblance to Celia Hurly that he could see in the vivid attraction of the girl, even allowing for the poor quality of the print. Puzzlement showed in his face.
‘She still looks like that,’ Celia said. ‘And yes, I know I don’t now, but I did. I meant she’s just like me in other ways. A tart who learned to cook. I made her learn to cook, made her go to college for it, just to make her pay attention – oh, what’s the use trying to explain it? She was just fixated by her own body, you know, and the power it gave her. Had sex standing up with any man or boy capable and some who weren’t, ever since she was fourteen. She didn’t even charge. I told her, if that’s how you’re going to make your living, you should at least charge.’
Andrew was not understanding any of this and did not want it to continue. Surely the past was the past and no one could advise this unhappy woman on how to rewrite it. Concentrate on the present: seek facts for Sarah.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘She’s come back, has she? Someone’s seen her, you said. That’s … nice.’
Celia nodded, vigorously.
‘She may have been hanging round for a day or two, several sightings, I’m told. Even deaf old Mrs Smith said to me, on my way here, it must be lovely to have Jess back, and she’s deaf, so it takes a long time for news to get through to her, then she repeats it like a parrot. I’d probably know more if I went to the butcher, but I couldn’t face that today. He was very rude to me yesterday.’
Andrew realised with a sinking heart that she assumed he knew the whole background, so there was no way she was going to begin at the beginning. People like Celia Hurly often assumed that the tragedies of their lives were common knowledge; perhaps it was better than the realisation that they were neither famous or infamous, possibly the subject of indifference. And they might also fail to consider that the vicar, who was supposed to know everything, spent his life avoiding gossip for fea
r of causing it.
‘Can you tell me why you thought she might have come here to the vicarage? Rather than to you, I mean.’
Celia Hurly looked at him incredulously, impatient with his unjustified ignorance.
‘Because Father Gavin was her greatest friend, of course. He counselled her. This was her second home. She might have thought his successor would protect her.’
‘Protect her from what?’
She leant forward intently and snatched back the photograph, crumpling it further in the process.
‘From the several people of both sexes in this village who wish she’d never been born. From the ones who were ashamed of being seduced and would like to see her flayed alive, like our wretched patron saint, good old Bartholomew. She didn’t just leave, you silly man, she was excommunicated. Well, you know what the church did with excommunicated heretics. They weren’t welcomed back, whatever the degree of repentance, unless they happened to be willing to be burned at the stake.’
The vicar reminded himself of his role as teacher and pedantic pastor.
‘I think you might be confusing heretics and martyrs,’ he said. ‘And it’s an awfully long time since the Inquisition. Do you think you could help me by going right back to the start? Dates, facts, that kind of thing? Such as, for instance, could you tell me how she came to accuse my predecessor of indecent assault? Is there some explanation for her conduct? There usually is.’
He found that his voice was rising.
‘Could she have been looking for love, Mrs Hurly? For attention? Was it drugs?’ Mrs Hurly glared at him, then stared down at her glass.
The rim was red with plum-coloured lipstick: her hand trembled with the effort to control it.
‘She was ill. She saw enemies when they were friends. She had too much of everything,’ Celia Hurly said. ‘Too much of everything and never enough, once her father stopped loving her and left her by dying. She went on a crash course of promiscuity and destruction, messed on her own doorstep, big time. It was me who sent her away and told her not to come back. I thought it was for her own good, because the illness was here. I wish I hadn’t done that. I locked the door on her. She set fire to the boats.’
Someone had been here. Sarah thought of the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, living in a cottage like this and coming in from the day’s labours to find traces of a visitor. Someone’s been eating my porridge, says Daddy Bear. Someone’s been sitting my MY chair, intones Mother Bear, and while the pantomime tension rises, they finally get the picture that someone is actually there, so they go upstairs to find a sweet little girl asleep in bed after all that porridge, and instead of tearing her limb from limb and eating her up, they adopt her, because she’s so sickeningly sweet. Moral: virtue has its own reward; sweet little virgins will be left alone. For the moment, Sarah chose not to go upstairs. Her cottage was redolent with emptiness, nothing creaked or stirred; whatever presence had been there had eaten some of the food and gone. A bowl with traces of cereal was in the sink, the remnants of it set like cement. The drawer where cutlery was kept remained open, the kitchen chairs were in the wrong place as if the trespasser had been indecisive about where to sit. There were biscuit crumbs and milk spillage, a half-finished cup of coffee, nothing returned to its place, no subterfuge, as if he or she knew they were welcome and lived here already and would come back later to clear up or not, forgiven in advance for their own litter. The carelessness reminded her of a man, and also of Jessica. Jessica never finished a cup of anything. Hope stirred.
‘Jessica?’ she called out. ‘Jessica? Where are you?’
Futile: there was no smell of her. A bunch of herbs had been left outside the front door as if to ward off the devil. Sarah was perturbed rather than alarmed by all these pieces of trace evidence because she felt safe here, could not allow herself to feel threatened in daylight. Perhaps it was a child off the school bus. Fear was for after dark. She went upstairs. Someone’s been sleeping in my bed.
Apart from the casement windows, it was a featureless all-white room. The only colour was in the clothes strewn over a chair and the scarlet silk bedspread she had brought with her and straightened affectionately every morning because she liked the feel of it. A gift from Mike for his scarlet woman: she thought of him briefly and wished he were here. It was rumpled now, as if someone had lain down and got up again, thinking better of it. Her lovely bedspread had been rejected and there was something absurdly insulting about that. Sarah moved to the window and looked down into the garden. The rain came down solidly, bringing darkness with it, and there was a foreign shape down there, an alien thing sloped against the back wall and almost melding with the background brick. She ran back downstairs, opened the front door and propped it ajar in case she had to escape. Then she moved to the back and pushed open the door from the kitchen to the yard. It stuck in winter and spring, swollen with rain, burst open at the second shove, noisily.
The thing was a man sitting in the largest flowerpot with his head on his knees and his arms encircling his legs, bent double over himself and looking asleep and very still, like an oversized garden gnome until the kitchen door burst open and Sarah stepped out hesitantly. Then he stood up and swayed towards her. He seemed either drunk or half asleep; there was nothing aggressive about him apart from his sheer size and his eyes were fixed on something beyond her – the light from the kitchen door, perhaps, a warmth that drew him back indoors.
‘Door slammed,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Got stuck, couldn’t get back in. Oh, shit.’
He stopped within inches of her. Because his presence was mesmerising, Sarah resisted the temptation to run back and out of the front door. The size of him was intimidating in the small space, but again, the little house seemed to give reassurance and the presence of a pair of spectacles hanging crookedly on his nose somehow took some of the threat out of him. The glasses were rain-streaked: he might have been as blind as a bat, with an alternative vision of the world he was in, but it did not say much for his ability to strike out. He focused on her for the first time, looking down at her, his shoulder level with the top of her head. He was soaking wet, looked up longingly towards the kitchen door and said, ‘Oh, shit’ again. A man of few words, wet and tired, was what she saw.
‘Hello,’ Sarah said, waving a hand in front of his eyes. He reached for his glasses, tore them off his nose, dropped them, swayed and reached out an arm to support himself on the door jamb, shaking his head to release a shower of rain from his hair.
‘Would you like to come in?’ she asked, formally, as if she was greeting a stranger at the front door rather than a burglar at the back. Then she stood aside. He lurched through the doorway and landed in one of the kitchen chairs, sat in it, hugging himself, beginning to shiver uncontrollably.
‘Take your coat off,’ she ordered, speaking loudly.
He shook his head.
‘Take it OFF.’
He did. Sarah took the towels which had been drying on the kitchen radiator and handed him two. Yesterday had been washing day, they were bone dry and warm.
‘For your hair,’ she commanded.
He snuggled into the towels and ignored her, so she wrapped another towel round his head, sat back and watched the tableau they had created. Large man with luxuriant dark hair, wearing clean turban, beginning to get warm. The front door slammed, loudly. It did that routinely when both front and back doors were open wide enough to create a big enough draught, but it still did not feel right and she went to look. Mr Man at the table wasn’t going anywhere fast.
Jeremy was standing in the hallway, holding in one hand the bunch of fennel she had found waiting on the doorstep and cradling a newspaper-wrapped parcel.
‘Don’t you want these?’ he was asking belligerently. ‘The door was open, I picked them specially, and I got you a rabbit, that’s why I was waving at you, only you wouldn’t come in. Should have been a fish, I reckon you might like a fish better, Jessica did. Someone said she was back. Only I couldn’t ge
t a fish.’
It was surreal in an oddly acceptable way and Sarah was pleased to see him. She smiled, motioned him to put his burdens down on the small table in the narrow entrance, and put her finger to her lips. Sam’s words were in her ears. Trust him to have a key? Help out in a crisis, yes.
‘Thanks,’ she whispered. ‘Can you come in a minute? Only this bloke’s arrived and I don’t know who he is.’
There was the sound of movement from the kitchen. Nowhere was far from anywhere in this house; all sounds audible.
‘Like, he broke in?’
‘No,’ she hissed, wincing at the loudness of Jeremy’s voice. ‘He was just here.’
Jeremy squared his shoulders and marched through to the kitchen. She followed from behind, lingering at the door. There was a shuffling silence, then a laugh.
‘Well, if it isn’t Jack Dunn,’ Jeremy said, punching him on the shoulder. ‘Where the hell have you been? If you’ve come to find your dog, mate, you’re too bloody late.’
Jack Dunn stirred. He banged his fist on the table twice and sat up, slowly. He was very thin, thinner even than Jeremy. They could almost have been brothers. Whatever place he was in, it seemed to be unbearable. He was shaking his head in disbelief, as if he had just awoken from a dream.
‘Hello, Jerry,’ he said. ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re in someone else’s house, you fool. You shouldn’t be here.’
Jack Dunn, he of the letters and unpaid bills and unfinished business, younger than she thought, disgracefully young, took off his glasses and cleaned them with a towel. He looked completely defenceless and there was no longer any question of being afraid of him. Sarah reckoned she had put that fear behind her before Jeremy had arrived. Jack Dunn was harmless – pitiable, even. She had always had a soft spot for men in trouble.
‘But this is my house,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it? I put my key in the lock and it fitted.’
‘Was your house, Jack. It’s this lady’s house now. You left the house and you left the dog. She got run over, Jack. Sam kept her for you to bury. You should have taken her with you.’
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