by Kathy Shuker
Adam was keen to go but most of the Craft Yard units intended to remain open for the afternoon and he was undecided, reluctant to go alone. He had been tempted to ask Claire but she wasn’t in V and C. In any case, he had barely seen her since their last meeting, whether by design or chance, he wasn’t sure. Then Jane had turned up in his studio, asking if he’d like to join her at the races, and the decision was made. He’d grabbed his camera, shut the studio up and now they were already half way down the hill together.
‘Go on then,’ he pressed, as they walked. ‘What’s the secret to winning? You must know. You must have worked the averages.’
Jane gave a tinkling laugh. ‘The secret, Adam, is: there is no secret. It’s complete chance. The fastest current on the river used to be on the north side - that’s where the winner always comes down - though the currents have probably changed since we were kids. But you have no say in where the duck will get put anyway, so you have no control over it. Unless maybe you bribe one of the officials.’
‘What, bribe a teacher? I can’t do that. I’d better resign myself to losing then.’
‘You never know. You might get lucky.’
She laughed again. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her quite so…what? It was hard to place her mood. Usually she had a studied, carefully managed, cool air, but today she exuded energy in some way, as if she had been left on charge just a little too long.
‘When we were kids,’ she said, ‘we used to race along the path by the river, shouting our heads off, calling out the names of our ducks, willing them to win. Claire’s probably told you. I bet she still could - she does all that jogging, doesn’t she? But I think it’d kill me now.’ Jane glanced up at him. ‘In fact, I thought you and Claire would be going together or are you meeting her down there?’
‘Oh…you know…’ he said diffidently. ‘…I’m not sure what Claire’s doing. Or even if she’s working today or not.’
‘What?’ She stopped walking and turned towards him. ‘Are you telling me you’ve broken up with her?’ Her mouth hung open, her eyes puckered with concern.
‘No, it wasn’t really like that, Jane. We never got beyond, you know, being friends.’
‘She’s dumped you.’
‘No. I told you, we were just friends.’
She scowled at him as if he had done her a personal injury then started walking again, a brisk, angry walk.
‘I gather you haven’t spoken to her lately then?’ he asked.
‘No. We bumped into each other the other day in Lostwithiel, but…’ She shrugged. ‘…we don’t have much in common these days,’ she added coldly.
They walked a few more paces in silence.
‘Has she gone back to Neil?’ Jane demanded suddenly. ‘I bet she has.’
Adam flicked her a pinched look. ‘I’ve no idea.’
She stared at him as if she didn’t believe him but let the subject drop and they walked the rest of the way in silence.
The early morning rain had cleared and the sunshine had brought out both locals and tourists. There were families and children everywhere. A booth selling tickets for the duck race was positioned near the river and an array of refreshment stalls circled the green. The haunting smell of cooking meat rose from a hog roast on the edge of the car park. Jane saw someone she knew and made her excuses as if she couldn’t wait to leave him.
Adam was relieved to see her go and wandered across to the ticket booth to get some tickets. He bought two for each of the first two races and they put his name down against Arnie and Matilda in the first race and Angie and Larry in the second. The first was due to start at one-thirty which gave him ten minutes to kill. He took a couple of photos, then bought a pork bap from the pig roast and idled with the rest of the crowd, working his way close enough to the river to get a view of the race.
He had just got there when a woman’s voice boomed through the loudspeaker.
‘The first race is about to start. No more tickets will be sold now. Listen for the whistle everyone.’
The crowd fell silent. The sound of a duck call whistle from up by the bridge crackled through the loudspeaker and everyone leaned forward, trying to get the first glimpse of the yellow ducks bobbing towards them. But just as Adam expected to feel the buzz of excitement too, a feeling of dissociation descended on him. He saw people shouting and children jumping up and down but he barely heard them; they could have been the other side of a glass screen for all he registered. He was acutely aware of how alone he was, a single man, an onlooker. He wasn’t involved in the event at all. He had no children and no partner. Maybe he was always an onlooker but that was his choice, wasn’t it, because he refused to get involved.
He heard a whoop of delight and looked round. A man nearby had a young child sitting on his shoulders while he grasped the boy’s ankles. The child’s face was a picture of rapt attention and both father and son smiled broadly as the first duck came into view. Adam felt a rare pang of jealousy at their clear rapport. He noticed children everywhere these days in a way he never had before. A toddler burst into tears to his left, the child’s mother desperately trying to calm the boy down as his wails grew louder; an older sibling chimed in, shouting at the youngster to be quiet.
Adam needed a drink and he started to ease through the crowd to get to The Swan but Claire’s words drifted into his head as he reached the door: it doesn’t help, trust me. He sighed heavily and paused. He knew she was right. He’d been trying to forget Zoe in a bottle for months with no real success. In fact sometimes he thought it actually massaged his sorrow, as if that sorrow had formed a life of its own, distinct from Zoe, just an abstract mass of pain, and it needed the alcoholic nourishment to keep it alive. Maybe it wasn’t about Zoe at all - perhaps he was just using her as an excuse for not getting on with his life.
Huh. What was that life? Was it destined to be simply a long succession of paintings, punctuated by occasional lads’ nights in the pub? Was he going to keep repeating the Zoe experience till he was so old that no girl was interested in him any more? When he was younger, he had assumed, like most people, that he would have a family one day. Had that been social pressure or because he genuinely desired one? He still hadn’t resolved that one. The question lurked at the back of his mind and resurfaced whenever his guard was down, often in the bottom of a glass.
He trudged back onto the green, bought a paper beaker of ginger beer from one of the stalls, and stood at a slight remove to drink it, trying to calm his thoughts. Neil Pennyman passed him, hesitated, then turned and stopped, offering a magisterial nod of recognition.
‘Painting going well?’ he enquired briskly. ‘Have it done in time, will you?'
‘Definitely. It’s going really well.’ Adam hoped he looked convincing.
Neil nodded and walked on.
A man was chalking the winner of the first race on a blackboard by the ticket booth and the woman with the microphone was exhorting people to come and buy tickets for the second race while they still could. Then Adam saw Claire appear at the end of the path from the bridge, jogging, clearly trying to keep up with the ducks, and Adam found himself trying to ease back through the crowd towards her. For all her frankly expressed opinions about his life, she usually made him feel better about it somehow and he could do with her down to earth company at this moment. He needed grounding in some way.
But he was still ten yards away from her when he saw Neil Pennyman walk up to her, lean forward to give her a kiss, and speak. Adam stopped moving and watched them, jostled by the crowd but indifferent to them. He saw that Neil had made Claire smile as though she’d found what he’d said genuinely amusing, and now she was talking herself and laughing, gesturing with her hands and pointing to the river, her face as animated as he’d seen it. So Claire had been telling the truth then: she did still love Neil. It was written in the radiance of her face. Adam wasn’t sure he’d ever believed it before.
He finished the ginger beer and walked away towards the road, tossed
the beaker in a bin, then paused and pulled the duck race tickets out of his pocket, screwing them up and lobbing them in too. It wasn’t surprising that Claire had been so reluctant to discuss Neil and the rest of the Pennymans in their investigation. He might as well forget Gilly. In any case, there was nowhere for their investigation to go; they had reached an impasse and they had ruffled too many feathers - perhaps dangerously. Maybe the hair slide had never been Gilly’s anyway. Perhaps Claire’s fixation on it had been an act of desperation; in all honesty he had had his doubts.
He started walking back up towards the bridge. He should go back to work though his head hurt with so much bouncing around in it. Why was it that he never read relationships right? He was a sap.
He reached the crowd milling over the bridge, waiting to watch the start of the next race but he barely hesitated, pushing his way through the mêlée and striding up the hill, the sounds of children’s shouts and laughter carrying after him.
Chapter 17
Claire stood in front of the long mirror which hung on the back of her wardrobe door and turned first one way, then the other, studying the effect of the dress she was wearing, the third she had tried on. It was the sixteenth of May and she was due up at the house for Eve’s seventieth birthday party. Seven for seven-thirty the invitation said. Claire should know - she had read it often enough.
She had mixed feelings about going but Neil had insisted she should come. Turning up at the door with the invitation a few days previously, he’d said he would enjoy it so much more if she were there.
‘Otherwise,’ he’d said, ‘who am I going to spend the evening with? A load of relatives and friends of Eve’s I barely know, or my dear brother and sister when we’re bound to end up arguing about the vineyard as usual? No, I need you to rescue me. Please say you’ll come, Claire. And, if not for me, come for Laura. She’ll want your moral support.’
‘Has Laura said she’s coming?’ asked Claire.
‘Well, she’s been sent an invitation and it is her grandmother’s seventieth, after all. Mum’s expecting and hoping she’ll be there.’
Eve can expect all she likes, thought Claire now, still examining herself in the mirror.
‘Oh, it’ll do,’ she said, out loud. ‘God knows, it’s no worse than the others.’
She brushed her hair, grabbed a cotton cardigan from the drawer and went downstairs to do her make-up in the bathroom. Afterwards, walking through to the living room to look for her car keys - she always put them down somewhere different - she saw the hair slide sitting on top of the sideboard in its little pouch and the next minute she was tipping it out onto her hand again.
She kept doing this. The world would stop while she stared at this shiny bit of plastic, handled it, willed it to tell her something, anything. She was so confused that she thought she had got to the point where she would even be relieved to be told once and for all that it had no significance, that it wasn’t Gilly’s. When had she started having doubts? When had she first dared to acknowledge those doubts? Even now, she struggled to let them linger in her mind and be rationally considered. To suggest the slide wasn’t Gilly’s after all seemed as preposterous as a politician insisting he always told the truth.
Yet she did doubt. For a while she had managed to convince herself that the silent phone calls proved that she had rattled someone’s guilty cage. It was a scare tactic, designed to put her off further investigation. But her conviction hadn’t lasted. People got silent calls all the time – computer-generated most of the time - and they had no significance. She saw no pattern to them and they hadn’t escalated - if anything, they were happening less frequently. They meant nothing.
And, except for an odd word exchanged in passing at the Yard, Adam hadn’t spoken to her since that night at his house. He’d dropped off the art materials at V and C one day when she wasn’t there, just as he had promised. They had got nowhere and he had drawn a line under the whole affair; she couldn’t blame him.
She carefully replaced the slide in the velvet bag and put it down, found her car keys and left. It wasn’t until she was driving up the lane to the house, that an idea occurred to her, something so simple and so obvious that she was amazed she hadn’t thought of it before. There was still something she could do to find out where the slide came from. It would be a last throw of the dice and more than a little rash perhaps, but still a risk worth taking. Gilly deserved nothing less.
*
‘I just thought you’d like to know,’ the woman’s voice said in his ear, ‘because you and Zoe seemed so happy there for a while and, well, the truth is - Zoe might kill me for telling you this - but I think she misses you. And she’s too proud to say so. I think she knows she screwed up by walking out on you so… Anyway, I just rang to tell you. In case you guys can find some way to patch it up.’
Adam thanked her and closed the call. He had just come out of the shower when Zoe’s sister, Ellie had called, and he was still dripping, still trying to pull the towel round him with his free hand. He was stunned, thrilled…maybe. Was it true? Did Zoe regret her decision or was this a case of Ellie doing some well-intentioned but ill-judged matchmaking?
He put the phone down on the lid of the linen basket and rubbed himself dry, tension making him do it a little more furiously than usual till his skin tingled. He kept looking at the phone suspiciously as if it weren’t to be trusted. This was what he wanted, wasn’t it? This was a chance to get back to where they were. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He’d been thinking about this a lot, ever since the duck race. He’d thought about the wonderful bond he’d seen between that little boy and his dad and about the joy he’d seen on the other kids’ faces when they’d been jumping around, watching the ducks bobbing down the water. They had made him ache a little inside. If he agreed to start a family with Zoe, he was sure that would bring her back because that had been the big stumbling block all along. And he thought the ‘living in the middle of nowhere’ issue would drop out of the equation. Quid pro quo. It might work.
He dressed, calmer now, then picked up the phone, keyed in her number and waited.
‘Adam?’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect to hear from you.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘Mind? No. No, actually it’s good to hear your voice.’ She sounded like she was smiling.
‘Ellie told me you were flying solo again.’ He cringed. What a terrible way to put it.
Zoe laughed. ‘Typical sister, eh? It’s true though.’ She paused. ‘I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.’ Her voice was soft and caressed his ear. ‘I have, honestly. Adam, I’m sorry if I hurt you.’
‘I’ve been thinking about you too.’ He hesitated. Go for it, he told himself. ‘Do you think we could give it another go?’
‘Oh Adam, I don’t know.’ She was silent. He wished he could see her face, have a better idea what she was thinking. He hated not being able to touch her. ‘I do miss you…’ she was saying, ‘…but nothing’s changed, has it? I don’t want to come back to start the same old arguments again. We want different things, don’t we?’
‘Well, maybe, maybe not. I’ve been thinking too, wondering what I want out of life.’
A pause. ‘Sounds deep,’ she said, cautiously. ‘Come to any conclusion?’
‘Sort of. I’ve been selfish, Zoe, and I’m sorry. I am really.’
Silence. She wasn’t making this easy for him.
‘I saw an adorable little boy sitting on his father’s shoulders at the duck race a couple of weeks ago. It made me think what I’m missing.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. I do want children, Zoe, I’ve decided. We should go for it.’
‘You’re sure? You’re not going to change your mind if I come back?’
‘No. Absolutely not.’
She started to talk, all excitement and plans and he had no idea what because he had zoned out and felt numb. Somewhere in the periphery of his brain he sensed a vague feeling of relief tha
t he had made a decision and he had made Zoe happy. He did want her to be happy. A random thought had him wondering what their children would be like; he sincerely hoped they looked like Zoe.
He glanced at his watch and cut across her chatter. ‘Zoe? Are you busy this evening? The thing is, I’ve got to go up to The White House, to be there while they present a commission I did for them. It would be so great if you could come with me. Would you? I could pick you up if you can.’
*
Claire looked round the huge sitting room of The White House, at the crush of maybe fifty bodies, at the long banner draped across the chimney breast reading Happy 70th Birthday Eve, at the big wooden easel by the side of the fireplace which had a white sheet thrown over it. There seemed an inevitability about her coming back to this place. However much she thought she would distance herself from it, still she kept coming back, as if it had some magnetic pull on her. She supposed it did: he was called Neil. And here he came, holding two glasses of wine.
‘Who are all these people?’ she asked. ‘There’s a lot of faces here I don’t know - or at least that I’ve forgotten.’
He grinned. ‘When we told mum about the party it grew and grew as she kept thinking of people: neighbours from way back; people she went to school with. Like those weddings where you can’t invite Auntie Flo without asking Cousin Sarah in case someone gets offended, she thought they should all come. Fortunately, they couldn’t all make it.’ He offered her an apologetic look. ‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to speak to them all - or any of them. Just talk to me. Mum’ll do the circulating; she’s good at that.’
‘I remember.’
‘You look lovely, by the way.’