At first she thinks she’ll lead him through the woodland circumnavigating the lake, where the trees shiver in their near-leafless state and throw long, spiny shadows out over the water, but then she remembers the rain and how boggy it will be, so instead she turns to strike out across the meadow and up the steep track leading over the hills. The higher up they go the more stripped-back the land becomes until soon they are walking across open moorland. For a while they walk in silence, their arms swinging at their sides, a metre or so apart all the way.
‘Where are we going?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know,’ she admits, unwinding her woollen scarf, letting it dangle from her hands, ‘just rambling.’
He nods. ‘OK.’
Eventually they come to an old stone wall. ‘Shall we sit for a bit?’ she asks.
They perch together on the weathered wall and gaze out at the vast sky. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she says. ‘Look, that must be the cottage, all the way down there.’ She points to a thin plume of smoke rising in the distance, evidence of the fire they have left smouldering in the grate. ‘Don’t you feel a million miles away from London right now? From the rest of the world?’
‘Yes,’ says Tom, but the way he says it doesn’t make it sound like a good thing.
Lila wonders if now is the time for them to talk, up here, in the clean air, away from everything that is familiar or real. Geographical change is good, she knows, it’s a distraction, but she’s also coming to understand that Tom is right; she can’t outrun her grief. As much as she wishes she could leave it far behind, like a sprinter taking off from a start line, she sees that no matter how fast she runs, she is on an oval track, and she only ever comes back to the beginning, back to the pain she hasn’t yet worked out how to live with. So perhaps she should discuss the baby with him. Perhaps she should discuss her strange and disturbing dreams in more detail, but every time she thinks to bring it up she loses her nerve. The only thing it seems Tom wants to talk about is when she will give up the cottage and return home.
He sighs and shifts on the wall next to her. ‘It’s so remote, Lila. I’m worried about you, that’s all.’
‘I’m OK. I like the space . . . the freedom. I like waking in the morning with that ache in my muscles that tells me I’ve done a real day’s work.’
‘And I like waking in our bed with you beside me.’
‘I just don’t want to be there right now. I can’t explain it.’
‘You mean you don’t want to be with me right now?’
‘No. I didn’t say that. It’s not you. It’s just this feeling of . . . of—’
‘Of what, Lila?’
‘I can’t explain.’
‘Well try.’
Lila sighs.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ says Tom eventually, so quietly she almost doesn’t hear.
‘I know that,’ says Lila, shocked. ‘Why would I think losing Milly was your fault?’
He shrugs. ‘Sometimes it feels as though you’re blaming me.’
Lila is baffled. The only person she has been blaming in all of this is herself. ‘I’m not blaming you . . . but it might help if you talked to me about it . . . if you opened up a little. Sometimes I feel as though I’m the only one who’s grieving for her.’
Tom shakes his head. ‘How can you say that?’
‘Well, for one thing you could talk about her . . . you could say her name.’
Tom stares at her.
‘You never say it. Milly: you never say your daughter’s name.’
‘I do.’
‘No,’ Lila shakes her head firmly, ‘you don’t.’
Tom is silent, his head lowered. When he speaks next his voice is so quiet she has to lean in close to hear him. ‘I say it in my head . . . sometimes it feels like she’s all I have in my head.’
She nods, understanding, but still can’t help noticing he hasn’t said their daughter’s name out loud. ‘Look,’ she says after a while, softening her voice, ‘why don’t you take some time off work and come and stay here for a little while? Two pairs of hands will be much quicker than one. It will be a chance for us to be together. It could be good for us.’
‘You know I can’t just drop everything.’ He runs his hands through his hair and then gazes out across the horizon. ‘It’s not a good time at work.’
‘I just think—’
But he cuts her off. ‘Lila, I don’t know what’s going on with you but we can’t go on like this. Come home, please. I need you.’
She looks at him, stung. He doesn’t know what is going on with her? Does he not remember what they went through – together – just a few short months ago? The agony of the labour, the terrifying sight of their baby – too small – too pale – being whisked away by the nurses and hooked up to a scary array of tubes and machines in the neonatal unit. Does he not remember the tears, the bruises, the heartache of losing their daughter? The loss of all they’d dreamed of? Of course the physical signs of the pregnancy and the fall have gone: her body has shrunk back in on itself, the cuts and bruises have healed . . . but her heart . . . her heart is another thing entirely, still damaged, still broken. Does he really not remember any of that?
‘And I need this,’ she says finally. She looks across at him, tears in her eyes, imploring him to try to understand, but he keeps his gaze fixed on the blank sky overhead, his eyes trained on a kestrel wheeling and turning on a thermal high above their heads. ‘Tom?’
He doesn’t turn and staring at him she feels an anger spiral up from deep inside. This is their problem, she thinks, this disconnect they just can’t seem to get beyond.
Leaving him on the wall, she jumps down, turns on her heel and stomps off across the boggy terrain, the cold wind drying the tears in her eyes before they can spill down her cheeks. Let him find his own way back to the cottage, Lila thinks; she doesn’t care.
When they say goodbye later that evening, a small part of her is relieved to see him go. It hasn’t been the romantic reunion either of them had been hoping for. With Tom there, Lila has seen the place differently again, through his eyes, noticing every flaw and every imperfection, every job that needs doing, big and small; but rather than make her want to leave, it has fired up that stubborn part of her that won’t let it go. It has made her impatient to keep going, to fix things before she can lose heart.
She heads upstairs to the bedroom, eyes the camp bed where Tom lay just a few hours before. She reaches for his blanket and folds it into a neat square then perches on the bed frame and gazes, unseeing, at the dusty old fireplace across the other side of the room. She can feel her grief there with her still; like a well-worn garment that she has unpacked from her bag, shaken out and hung neatly on the clothes rail in the corner; a permanent, physical fixture hanging silently, waiting for her there no matter where she goes.
She gazes into the empty hearth and wonders how on earth she and Tom will ever reconnect across the chasm of their grief. She churns it over and over in her head until her mind turns outwards and her eyes begin to focus on a strange shadow upon the brickwork of the chimney breast. It’s probably just soot but she moves across the room and reaches out to touch the stone with her fingertip. The brick slips slightly and she sees that if she pulls a little she can remove it completely from where it is lodged. She tugs on it gently and the brick comes away in her hand, and there, beneath it, is a folded piece of paper, grey with dust and grime.
Quickly, she unfolds it and reads the first words of a handwritten scrawl. I can’t stop thinking about it . . . it begins.
Lila feels her heart begin to hammer in her chest. She thinks about the funny mural in the other room, the bullet hole downstairs, the pile of junk waiting to be burned at the top of the garden and then looks back to the piece of paper in her hand. Somebody was here. Somebody committed these words to paper and stashed them behind this stone. The goose bumps are back on her arms. She glances around, trying to rid herself of the echo of Tom’s words spoken in the very same ro
om only hours earlier: something happened here. She shakes her head and then, with trembling hands, she smooths out the crumpled sheet of paper and begins to read.
10
NOVEMBER
1980
‘Kat!’
Kat slams the pen down and slides the notepad she has been scribbling on beneath the bedclothes.
‘Kat, didn’t you hear me calling you?’ Freya stands in the doorway to their bedroom with her hands on her hips.
‘What?’
‘Are you coming? We’re waiting for you.’ Freya eyes her. ‘What are you doing, anyway?’
Kat edges the paper deeper beneath the bed covers. ‘Nothing. Just having a lie-in. Is that OK?’
Her sister shrugs. ‘Of course. It’s just we thought you wanted to collect chestnuts with us. You said last night—’
‘Who else is going?’
‘Carla, Ben . . . and Simon.’ The faintest blush spreads across Freya’s pale cheeks.
‘I’ll come,’ says Kat quickly. ‘Just let me get dressed.’
‘OK.’ Freya hesitates a moment.
‘What? What is it?’
Freya doesn’t move.
‘Are you just going to stand there?’
Freya swallows. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
Kat watches as her sister turns and leaves, listens to the sound of her footsteps retreating down the stairs, before falling back onto her pillow with a sigh. The notepad crackles beneath her. It’s not much, but it feels good to release some of her anger, to scratch out those ugly, bitter words onto a sheet of paper, to see them there in stark black ink. It’s a release, of sorts, a salve on the hot furnace of anger that burns inside her.
Ever since that stupid night when they took the mushrooms Kat has felt it gaining strength. She can’t help it. In the cold light of day she knows it was madness, all of them tripping, off their heads, but she just can’t get that image of Simon and Freya out of her mind. She’s tried and tried to banish it but every time she thinks it’s gone, it explodes like a firework, hotter, fiercer, brighter than before.
It wouldn’t be so bad if Simon was acting normally, but there is a distinct shift in their relationship now. She doesn’t know if it’s her – her anger driving a wedge between them – or if it’s him pulling away, acting more distantly towards her. It’s hard to gauge and she feels as if she’s second-guessing his every move, his every word, until she is crazy with suspicion and desperation. She just wants life to feel easy again.
But nothing is easy any more. It’s cold. She’s sick of eating pasta and rice and root vegetables. She wants to lie in a warm bath or eat buttered toast popped straight from a toaster, not half-burned offerings she has had to watch and turn on the smoking hearth. She wants to drink hot chocolate from an unchipped mug and snuggle up in front of an old movie on the television. She wants to flush a toilet, not sit shivering on that rough wooden seat in the earth closet, her eyes darting around in the gloom for spiders and beetles. She’s tired and she’s irritable and she wishes things would return to how they were just a few short days ago. Or better still, she wishes they could leave, that Simon would declare their little experiment over and announce that it’s time to go.
More than once now, Kat has fantasised about that woman returning – the one she saw last month standing up on the ridge with her dog. She’s imagined her coming over the hill with a cluster of angry villagers in tow. There would be shotguns and angry words and Kat and the others would throw up their hands, pack their belongings and drive away from the cottage, back to their old lives. Mac could drop them all in the city. They would shrug, say they’d had a good stab at it and then move on – her and Simon – to somewhere new, somewhere different. Just the two of them.
But even thoughts of abandoning their project fill her with anger. Whenever she finds herself thinking of it she gets mad; it should be Freya who leaves. Freya is the interloper, the uninvited guest. She should be the one to go; but Freya hasn’t yet given voice to her plans to leave and the others seem happy enough that she is there.
‘Kat!’ It is Simon’s voice now, loud and impatient, rising up the staircase. ‘Two minutes then we’re going without you.’
‘Coming,’ she yells and throws back the bedclothes, dressing quickly. She pauses before the mirror and grimaces. Her hair is still desperately short and sticks up at alarming angles from her head. She smooths it down as best she can then turns to leave and is almost out the door when she remembers the incriminating piece of paper still hidden beneath her sheets. She hurries back to the bed and pulls the notepad out, studies it for a moment wondering where on earth she can stash the sheet of paper where no one will find it. She should destroy it really, burn it so that no one can ever read her words – but there is no time so she rips the top sheet from the pad then moves across to the empty hearth and casts about desperately. There must be somewhere she can hide it? Not in her clothes. She and Freya are always rummaging through each other’s belongings, borrowing things. But then she sees it, a darker shadow around one of the worn stone bricks next to the fireplace. She tugs at it and sure enough the entire stone comes away in her hand, leaving behind it a perfect, dusty hole set into the wall. She folds the paper hurriedly into a tiny square and presses it into the space, then places the stone back into place. Perfect, she thinks. It looks almost exactly as it had before. No one will ever find it. She’ll come back to it tonight and burn it on the fire when the others are distracted.
‘Kat!’ Simon bellows.
She steps out of the bedroom and glides down the stairs, arranging her face into a picture of calm.
‘There you are,’ says Simon, turning to glare at her. ‘You took your time.’
‘Sorry,’ she says, fixing him with her brightest smile. ‘Shall we go?’
As they head out the door and down the grassy bank she falls carefully into step beside Simon, pleased to note Freya keeping her distance from them all, trailing behind with her gaze fixed upon the ground.
It had been Simon’s suggestion to forage once more for sweet chestnuts but Mac had warned them that they would struggle. ‘The squirrels will have had them all by now,’ he’d said, ‘and any left on the ground will be too damp. We got the best of them last month.’
‘What’s a little damp?’ Simon had asked, clearly annoyed that Mac wasn’t impressed by his plan. ‘We can dry them out. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,’ he’d crooned in a bad Bing Crosby impression.
The others had laughed but Mac just shook his head. ‘They go mouldy. Fine for Wilbur but no good for us.’
They’d only half believed him but as they make their way through the woods it is all too clear that Mac had been right. They wander aimlessly among the twisted trunks of towering trees and the few chestnuts they do find hidden among the wet leaf litter bear the telltale signs of deterioration. After three hours they admit defeat and return cold, hungry and empty-handed, bar a cluster of grub-infested nuts, which the piglet hoovers up hungrily from the flats of their palms. Kat’s stomach twists at the sight; she is more hungry than she knew.
Unfortunately, it’s becoming a common occurrence. Gone are the heady days of plucking velvety blackberries from brambles or scooping fish out of the lake. The hens’ laying has grown erratic and even Mac is struggling; more often than not he returns empty-handed, no longer the lifeless body of a rabbit or a pheasant swinging over his shoulder. The countryside is pulling down its shutters for winter.
‘There’s only one thing for it,’ Ben says, spooning out the remains of their rice later that night. ‘We’re going to have to start eating less, ration our supplies to get us through the winter. I think it’s time to tighten our belts.’
‘I’ve already tightened my belt two notches,’ says Carla, lifting up her sweatshirt to show them her pale, flat stomach. ‘This is the best diet ever; I’ve never been so slim.’ Kat glances at Carla and notes the hollows of her once plump cheeks. She’s right, she’s losing her curves; she supposes they all
are.
Simon nods. ‘Ben’s right. It’ll be a long, cold winter otherwise . . . and Wilbur will be in for the chop a little sooner than we thought,’ he adds, jerking his head in the direction of the pig sitting in Freya’s lap.
‘No, you can’t,’ she says, horrified.
‘We’ve still got some savings, haven’t we?’ asks Kat.
‘Yes, but we can’t keep dipping into them. We need to hold some back for emergencies.’
Ben looks worried. ‘But we need more milk powder and sugar. We’re getting low on salt and flour too.’
Simon holds his hands up. ‘I’m not saying we can’t buy essentials. Next year we’ll be far more prepared. We started too late this year.’
There are murmurs around the table.
‘Look,’ Simon continues, ‘I know it’s getting hard. I know we miss our home comforts. Personally, I would kill for a pint and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. But let’s not give up, just because it’s getting a little harder. We always knew these next few months were going to be the toughest. But we’ve come so far. We’ve been here four months already. No one has kicked us out yet. Let’s see it through into the new year. Come on,’ he says, looking at each of them in turn, ‘I’m up for it, aren’t you?’
Kat glances across at Freya. Her head is bowed; she isn’t looking at any of them. Maybe she will leave, thinks Kat. Maybe she’s had enough too. As if sensing her gaze, Freya raises her head and meets her eye. The two sisters stare at each other for a moment.
‘So who’s going to make the next trip to the shop with Mac?’ Simon asks, looking around at them all.
‘I’ll go,’ says Freya, and there is the slightest tilt of her chin as she says it.
‘Good. Tomorrow, then.’
Kat turns away from Freya. She can’t help it; part of her hopes she will go and just not come back.
Unfortunately she does come back. She bursts through the back door with Mac, her eyes glittering with excitement, her pale cheeks a rosy pink from the cold winter air. ‘You’ll never guess what we found,’ she says, placing two shopping bags filled with groceries onto the kitchen floor.
The Shadow Year Page 18