Next she turns her attention to the gutters, which don’t seem to be in too bad a condition, although she can see that they are clogged with leaf-sludge and in one or two places have rotted through and will need replacing. Another thing to add to the list, she thinks.
Turning her back on the cottage, Lila moves towards the wooden shack slumped against the hillside like an old man catching his breath. She is hopeful she might find a ladder lurking within its shadows. Inside there are tools hanging from large metal hooks – a scythe, a shovel, large secateurs and a pitchfork. Nearer the door is a gnarly stump of wood – an old chopping block with a rusty axe still wedged into its surface. She investigates further and is delighted to discover running along one wall not just a huge pile of firewood, but also a stack of grey slate tiles, a perfect match for the ones on the roof. That will certainly save her some time and money. Her discovery is made all the sweeter by the sight of an old ladder lying in the dirt. She hefts it up onto her shoulder and carries it back to the cottage where she raises it up against the front wall and spends the next couple of hours scooping handfuls of slimy muck from the gutters. It is horrible work but she sets to it with a quiet determination, happy to lose herself for a while in the simple task. She feels better, she realises. Outside in the daylight, in the brisk fresh air, her nightmares fade away. It’s always the way, she tells herself; everything always seems worse just before dawn.
With the last of the front gutters cleared, she begins to clamber down the ladder, balancing the bucket of debris on the rung beside her. From somewhere behind, she hears a fluttering of wings and leaves. She twists on the ladder, just in time to see a large magpie take flight from a tree down by the edge of the lake. One for sorrow, she thinks, remembering a line from a childhood rhyme. Lila watches the bird flit out across the water and fade into the backdrop of the hills before lowering her gaze to scan the line of trees closest to the water. The woods are dark and impenetrable but she gazes at them for a long moment and shivers. She can feel it. Someone is there. Someone is watching her.
She peers between the tree trunks, goose bumps prickling on her arms, but she can’t make out anything in the gloom . . . there’s nothing but waving branches and dark shadows. She shakes her head. Lack of sleep and the isolation of the place are definitely getting to her. There is no one out here – no one but her and the birds and the soft-sighing breeze skimming across the lake and rustling through the trees.
She climbs down the final steps of the ladder carefully. What with her nightmares and now this, she wonders if it’s time she got away for an hour or two and acquainted herself with the local neighbourhood. She’s surely earned herself a break? She will change and head to the nearest village – a place called Little Ramsdale just a few miles to the east, according to her map. She could do with a few groceries and someone there might be able to tell her more about her cottage and to whom it once belonged.
Behind the cottage a family of rabbits skitter out of her way, their tails flashing white against the long grass. She ducks beneath a drooping washing line hanging limply between two trees and on past the upturned chicken coop lying forlornly in the shade of a twisted apple tree, blown there, she presumes, by a violent wind. She stamps her boots, then slips inside to wash her hands and change into a clean pair of trousers.
Upstairs she stands at the cracked mirror, pulling faces at her distorted reflection as she pulls her hair into a ponytail. She’s running through a list of building contacts in her head, wondering whom she should call about the roof and the rising damp, when her eye is caught by the reflected outline of something scrawled across the wall behind her. Puzzled, she turns and moves a little closer, trying to understand what it is she is looking at. She kneels and rubs a hand across the surface of the wall, removing a layer of dust, then gazes more closely and rubs again, watching in amazement as a faint but distinct image slowly reveals itself, like a picture drawn in invisible ink by a child.
‘Huh,’ she says, sitting back on her heels and staring at the wall. She has rubbed the dirt from a rectangle about half a metre high by two metres across to reveal six of them, six strange stick figures dancing across the wall in a faint, purple scrawl. They are naive representations but it’s clear that three or four of the figures are male, the others female. In one stickman’s hands dangles a large, conical reefer. No doubt about it, thinks Lila, kids have been here.
She decides she will leave the mural alone for a while; there will be plenty of time to come back to it when the more important jobs have been completed, and in the meantime the six dancing figures will stay. It’s not as if she couldn’t do with the company.
There is only one shop in Little Ramsdale, a small greengrocer’s-come-post office in a quaint thatched building. Lila drives the length of the village but the only other places of note are a small stone church and a larger building that might have once been a pub, now converted into a private residence. Shame, she thinks; she could murder a pint. She turns the car around and parks in front of the village store.
A bell rings as Lila enters the shop and a middle-aged woman standing at the counter lazily flicking through the pages of a glossy magazine lifts her head and calls out a cheery, ‘Hello.’
‘Hi,’ says Lila, realising that this is the first person she has seen or spoken to in a couple of days.
‘Anything I can help you with, love?’
‘Thanks, I’m just getting a few bits.’
‘Righty-ho.’ The woman smiles and returns to her magazine, leaving Lila to peruse the limited shelves. She chooses a packet of biscuits, a loaf of bread, a pint of milk, four apples and a couple of tins of soup and takes them up to the counter.
‘That the lot?’
‘Yes thank you,’ says Lila.
The ruddy-cheeked woman rings the items up on the till. ‘That’ll be six pounds twenty, thanks, love.’ The woman eyes Lila as she rummages in her wallet for the money. ‘You holidaying round here?’ she asks.
‘Sort of. Well, no actually . . . I’m staying in the old stone cottage up near the lake. Do you know it?’
The woman thinks for a moment. ‘That old falling down place, up near the moors?’ she asks, eyeing her with interest.
‘Yes.’ Lila smiles. ‘It was left to me recently,’ she explains. ‘I’m just up here checking it out.’
The woman nods and fills Lila’s canvas shopping bag with her groceries. ‘That old place has been empty for such a long time. I wasn’t even sure it was still there, to be honest.’
‘I don’t suppose you know who it used to belong to, do you?’ Lila’s voice is hopeful, but the woman just shakes her head.
‘No, love. I think it’s been long forgotten.’
‘Has anyone . . .’ she doesn’t know how to ask tactfully so she just blurts it out in the end, ‘has anyone that you know of died round here recently?’
The woman gives her a strange look.
‘You see,’ continues Lila by way of explanation, ‘it was left to me by someone, but I don’t know who. I’d love to find out who it was.’
The woman looks puzzled. ‘I’m sorry, love. I’d like to help you but I just can’t think who it would be. No one that I know of has died in recent months, thank goodness.’ She touches the wooden shelf beside her.
Lila nods and tries not to look disappointed.
‘So you’ll be sticking around for a bit then?’ asks the woman.
‘Yes, for a few more days definitely.’
The woman smiles. ‘Well, you know where to come if you need anything. I’m Sally,’ she says, offering Lila her hand.
‘Lila.’ They smile at each other across the counter.
Back in the car she thinks to check her mobile phone and sees she has missed three calls from Tom. Knowing that he will be worried, she dials his number then watches two lycra-clad cyclists flash past her window as she waits for him to answer. His phone goes straight to voicemail.
‘Hi you,’ she says, putting on her cheeriest voice, ‘it�
��s me. Everything’s fine. I made it up here OK and the place isn’t quite as bad as I remembered, although I might have to bribe Barry or some of his boys to come up and help with the roof and the damp in the kitchen. All in all, though, the old place has held up remarkably well.’ She pauses, wondering what to say next. ‘Anyway, hope you’re OK. I just wanted to say hi.’ She hesitates and wonders if she should invite him to visit at the weekend. ‘So, I guess I’ll say bye then. Oh,’ she adds quickly, ‘my phone reception is really patchy up here . . . probably best if I try to ring you again tomorrow . . . or the next day. Hopefully we can speak then.’ She pauses. ‘Bye.’
It’s only after she’s hung up and swung her car back onto the country lane and made it halfway back to the cottage that she realises she forgot to tell him that she misses him.
8
OCTOBER
1980
The morning they are discovered, Kat wakes to a freshly iced landscape, everything pale and glittering, whitewashed overnight by the first sweep of winter’s paintbrush. It is still the same familiar picture, but brighter, whiter, blinding somehow, as if caught in a photographer’s flash. It takes her breath away.
‘Wake up,’ she urges Freya. ‘You should see this. It’s beautiful.’
‘Mmmm . . .’ mumbles Freya from deep beneath the bedclothes, ‘later.’
‘Suit yourself.’ She pulls on a sweater over her pyjamas and heads downstairs, passing Simon curled beneath a blanket in front of the ash-filled grate. She stops and watches him for a moment, noting his parted lips and his breath forming tiny white clouds in the air above his head. She looks around for Mac and sees an indentation in the sofa, evidence of where he has slept, but no other sign or sound of him.
Unable to resist, she moves across the room and slides beneath Simon’s blanket, pressing the length of her body against his. He murmurs, groggy with sleep, and then turns to her. ‘Good morning,’ she whispers and he nuzzles her neck. Breathless with her daring, she moves her hands down over his stomach and then under the waistband of his pyjamas.
‘Oh God,’ he says, with a groan and rolls on top of her. ‘Kat,’ he whispers, ‘my Kat.’ He smooths her hair off her neck and bends to kiss her, his lips grazing the skin above her collarbone. Then he moves over her and she raises her hips up off the floor, drawing him into her, moving with him.
‘I’ve missed this,’ she whispers into his ear, biting the lobe with her teeth until he shudders and goes still, leaning his full weight on her, pressing her into the hard floor. They are nothing but warmth and breath, his stubble scratching her cheek. ‘You need a shave,’ she murmurs and his laugh is hot against her neck.
She leaves him stretched before the fire and wanders into the kitchen to light the range. As she goes she can feel the sting and the scent of him on her skin. It was different this time; this time she went to him and she feels buoyed by his response, by his acceptance. She knows they should be more careful – that they should probably use contraception – but as she arranges kindling in the grate she wonders if it would really be so terrible to be pregnant with Simon’s child? She imagines them at the cottage, happy and content, a proper family: her and Simon and a child with his eyes and olive skin and Kat’s dark hair. No, she’s not exactly in a rush to have a baby, but if it happened . . . well, would it be so bad? A child with Simon would be a connection to him for all time, something nobody could ever take away from her. And it would be a chance too, for her to prove that she had moved away once and for all from her own broken childhood. A baby with Simon would be a chance to do things differently – to bury the ghosts of her past. As she puts a match to the twigs in the grate, she hums a quiet tune. It might not be on either of their minds, no, but if it happened it certainly wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
Within minutes she has got a crackling blaze going and a pan of water over the range readying to boil, but rather than stand there watching it, she slips through the back door and heads down the bank, her feet crunching on stiff white blades of grass, shattering them like glass.
The lake is still and serene, a low mist hanging in a diaphanous gauze above the water. One black cormorant skims the surface like a shadow before melting away into the fog. Higher up, just breaching the surrounding hills, the sun hangs like a pale moon in the sky, still gathering strength for the day ahead. Kat hugs herself and stamps her feet. The first frost; there’s no denying that winter is on its way.
They are in pretty good shape. With Freya’s extra help and a fair bit of luck they are making good progress. The larder is filling with jams and preserves, they’ve dried peas and mushrooms and begun to store root vegetables of every size and shape. Crab apples and plums have been retrieved from the trees up behind the house and several pumpkins discovered deep in the garden undergrowth. It’s surprised her how much they’ve been able to salvage from the forgotten garden. They’ve hung onions, rosehips and the last of the garden herbs to dry, and taken care to top up on basic supplies of pasta, rice, tins of canned food, flour, powdered milk, oil and sugar purchased from stores located in a variety of far-flung villages, always careful never to visit the same one in too quick succession. Best of all, the chickens have proved invaluable with their daily egg-laying, providing them with some much needed protein when the fishing rods or Mac’s traps have failed to produce. Mac’s warned them that the hens will bunker down for winter soon, but with the larder growing increasingly full there is no reason, it seems, that life at the cottage can’t continue unchecked into the winter months.
For Kat, however, the biggest blessing, she knows, is in feeling as though she is where she is supposed to be, with people who mean something to her. Not just Freya and Simon, but the others too. Freya was right: they don’t just feel like a group of friends hanging out, playing house any more. They feel like a family – one unconventional, chaotic family – but her family all the same. She’s never experienced anything like it before.
She bends down and trails her fingers through the water, no longer warm and inviting but crystal clear and skin-tinglingly cold. Pebbles glitter like pale gems in the silt. A strand of green weed undulates in the current. Their days of swimming in the lake, of sunbathing on the grassy bank, seem a lifetime ago. She shivers and thinks of tea, remembering the pan she has left boiling on the stove.
It’s as she turns back to the cottage that she sees her: a woman, standing high up on the ridge, her silhouette in stark relief against the pale sky. Kat is frozen to the spot, her breath caught in her throat. She is too far away for Kat to see her face, but she can tell from the tilt of the woman’s head and the stillness of her body that she is watching her. Kat stares back and for one interminably long moment the world slows, everything around them quiet and still, as they face off across the frosted ground.
Before Kat can react a golden labrador bounces over the ridge and stands panting at the woman’s feet, its tongue lolling from its mouth. Kat glances towards the cottage, seeing it as if through the woman’s eyes: the muddy boots scattered by the door, the ghostly outline of yesterday’s laundry – stiff with frost – still hanging on the washing line, the thin column of smoke just beginning to curl from the chimney, all indisputable evidence of their occupation. She drags her gaze back to the woman on the ridge.
She doesn’t know what she is waiting for. Angry shouts? Gesticulations? The waving of a loaded shotgun? Whatever it is, it’s not the slow raising of the woman’s hand in a hesitant gesture of greeting. Kat swallows and then, before she can stop herself, lifts her own hand in a half wave. The woman stares at her a moment longer, then seems to give the slightest nod before taking a step backwards, then another, and another . . . until she has disappeared over the ridge, the labrador melting away at her side.
Kat stands rooted to the spot a moment longer then turns and runs towards the cottage.
Simon is up and nursing a mug of tea at the kitchen table when she bursts through the back door. ‘I made a pot,’ he says, barely looking up.
‘Slow down. Who saw you? What are you talking about?’
‘A woman. She was just standing up there . . . watching me.’
Simon leaps up from the table and moves to the window. He peers out. ‘Where?’
‘Up on the ridge. She had a dog.’
He turns back to Kat. ‘What did she do? Did she say anything?’
‘No, she just sort of stood there and stared.’
‘Not a word?’
‘No.’ Kat pauses. ‘She waved.’
‘She waved?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I – I waved back.’
‘You waved back?’ Simon gapes at her. ‘What did she look like?’
Kat shrugs. ‘I don’t know. Middle-aged.’ She tries to think, remembers the woman’s long wax jacket and stout boots, the sensible shoulder-length hair. ‘She just looked . . . normal.’
Simon moves across the room and slumps back into his chair, then slams the table with his fist, sending Kat leaping backwards in alarm. ‘Damn it.’
Kat doesn’t know what to do. It feels as though it is all her fault. If only she hadn’t gone out to the lake . . .
‘What’s going on?’ asks Carla, appearing at the door with a yawn, wrapped in one of Ben’s misshapen sweaters and with her frizzy hair sticking up at startling angles from her head.
The Shadow Year Page 13