‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘They’ll love and admire you for it.’
‘Only if I’m a success,’ she said.
‘Of course you will be!’
She looked at Joe strangely, and afterwards it occurred to him that it wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear.
He must have dozed because the next thing he knew the alarm was sounding again. He opened his eyes to see Sarah silhouetted in the doorway.
‘Hi. Dinner’s almost ready.’
‘Give me five minutes.’
‘And your mobile just rang.’ She came and put it on the table beside him.
Thanks.’
He thought she might bend down and kiss him. He reached out to touch her, but it was dark and she was already moving out of range. She paused in the doorway. ‘It’s fish. I thought you’d probably be fed up with T-bone steaks.’
‘Great.’
It might have been his imagination, but he thought he caught a note of tension in her voice.
When he came into the living room he found what passed as his dining table pulled out into the middle of the room and laid with all the things he would have forgotten, like candles and napkins. There was even a single flower in a makeshift vase.
Sarah appeared with the first course. ‘I opened some white wine,’ she said. ‘Was that all right?’
‘Of course.’
As she took her seat, he asked, ‘How was your week?’
‘Oh, fine.’
‘No one escaped?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Metaphorically. Or literally, I suppose.’
‘No.’ She offered a sudden smile which didn’t quite reach her eyes.
‘Done your Christmas shopping?’
‘This morning. In two hours flat. The benefit of having a small family. My father likes books, my mother likes silk scarves.’
‘Do you open presents on Christmas morning? Or are you Christmas Eve people?’
Sarah put her fork down and gazed at him, and for an instant Joe thought he’d missed something. He gave a questioning smile.
‘Joe, I’ve booked a holiday. Starting on Boxing Day.’
His heart squeezed uneasily. ‘I see,’ he said, though he didn’t see at all. ‘When did you decide this?’
‘Three days ago.’
‘Rather sudden.’
‘I always forget how much I hate Christmas. Just hate it.
And I didn’t realise how tired I was.’ She gave a little shrug that didn’t quite come off.
‘I thought your office needed lots of warning about holidays.’
‘I’m lucky. They’re going to be able to cover for me.’
‘How long are you going for?’
‘Two weeks.’
His mouth was dry as he asked, ‘With someone else?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m going alone.’
He took a swig of wine. ‘Destination?’
‘Jamaica.’
‘A real holiday then.’
‘I got a cancellation on the Internet. Well, I imagine it’s a cancellation. A really good deal, anyway.’
‘I thought all the resorts there were for happy couples.’
‘Not all.’ She faltered. ‘Obviously.’
Under his gaze, she looked down at her plate. She fiddled with her fork. ‘I’m sorry but it’s going to use up the last of my holiday allowance.’
‘No Morocco?’
‘No.’
‘I get it,’ he said, hating the sarcasm in his voice.
‘Just for the record, Joe, it was my boss who suggested I take some time off. He thinks I need a break.’
‘Odd boss, to give you leave at a moment’s notice.’
‘He thought I was overworking.’
Joe took another gulp of his wine and heard the devil pipe up in him again. ‘Quite sure there won’t be anyone joining you?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘I shouldn’t take this as a coded message?’
She waited for him to spell it out.
‘Is this a way of saying we’re over?’
In the bedroom, his mobile chose that moment to start ringing. Sarah looked down at her plate while they waited for it to stop. After the fifth or sixth ring, there was silence. Sarah’s gaze met his. Then, after a moment in which she seemed to be steeling herself, she opened her mouth to speak.
‘Joe, I-‘
The phone began to ring again.
Joe hissed, ‘For God’s sake!’
‘Perhaps you should answer it.’
Joe strode into the bedroom and snatched up the phone.
He checked the display to see if it was anyone he knew, but there was no caller ID and no clue.
His aggressive hello was met by a long pause and what sounded like an intake of breath.
‘Hello?’ he barked again.
Another pause. He was about to ring off when a woman spoke. The voice, when it finally came, was soft and hesitant.
‘Joe?’
He felt a violent lurch, followed by a sharp sense of disconnection. One part of him knew what he was hearing; some other part refused to take it in; His throat seized and for an instant he couldn’t find the breath to speak. At last he whispered, ‘Jenna?’
Her voice was so faint it might have been coming from a long way away. ‘I just wanted to say…’
Then nothing. The fear knocked at his ribs. ‘Jenna?’ Silence.
‘Jenna?’
‘I wanted to say … I sang Messiah tonight.’ Then a sudden exhalation of breath, like a soundless laugh.
He whispered, ‘You did?’
In the pause that followed, he thought he could hear her breathing.
‘So … you see, Joe.’
‘Yes, I see. Yes!’
The rush of breath against the mouthpiece again, and what was unmistakeably a short broken laugh. Then, hastily: ‘Goodbye, Joe.’
And she was gone.
He felt a slight nausea, a clammy feeling. He was exhilarated, but he was also sick with the feeling he had missed his opportunity. Why hadn’t he said something? Why hadn’t he asked her if she was all right? Why hadn’t he come right out with it and asked her to meet him?
He was still clutching the phone to his ear. Hastily, he thrust the display up to his face and saw the station indicator light up again. He was still staring at it when Sarah appeared at the door.
‘Okay?’ she asked.
‘It was her,’ he said.
Sarah was quick, but not that quick. ‘Who?’
‘Jenna.’ And saying it, he finally believed it.
‘My goodness, Joe.’ She came closer. ‘That’s wonderful.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well… Is she all right?’
‘I think so.’
‘That’s great. I’m so pleased for you.’
‘Yes.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She said she’d been singing again.’
‘There you are. She must be all right.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she say where she was?’
He shook his head.
‘Did you ask?’
He shook his head again, more unhappily.
‘Perhaps the phone recorded her number.’
‘I was going to look.’
But he was too frightened to look: in case he pressed the wrong button and erased it, in case he was faced by ‘number withheld’.
Sarah disappeared and came back with a pencil and paper.
‘Do you want me to have a look?’
He sat down on the bed. ‘No.’ He scrolled carefully through the phone’s menu to received calls and, pressing select, saw a number come up that he didn’t recognise.
He read it out and Sarah wrote it down. For safety’s sake, he read it out a second time, and Sarah confirmed it.
He said, ‘Just remind me, if she’d withheld her number it would have said so, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?’
‘Should have done, yes. But take a lo
ok at missed calls.
Because it was probably her the first time, wasn’t it?’
Sarah was right: the same number came up under missed calls.
‘My God,’ Joe said, and still he couldn’t think straight.
‘Do you want me to get an address for it?’
The number had an area code he didn’t recognise. His head began to clear at last. ‘Yes, please.’
Sarah touched his shoulder lightly with her fingers. ‘I’m so pleased for you, Joe.’ And she took the slip of paper out of the room. When Joe followed a minute later he heard her in the kitchen, murmuring into her mobile.
‘Could be as soon as half an hour,’ she announced when she came back to the table.
‘Right.’ Remembering his manners, he said, ‘Thank you.
And thank your police friend too, would you?’
She nodded mechanically.
He tried to eat but couldn’t. He tried to drink but didn’t want to.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘I’m not too hungry myself,’ Sarah said. ‘I haven’t started cooking the fish yet. I could put it back in the fridge, if you like.’
‘She must have seen the ad,’ Joe murmured to himself.
‘It would look that way.’
‘So it’s definitely Hereford.’
‘I hope you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.’
‘How long would it take? If I left now.’
‘Don’t be crazy, Joe. You’ve had no sleep. You’ll kill yourself.’
Then, with a sigh: ‘Three hours? Maybe less. But Joe, don’t even think about it till you’ve had some sleep.’ She slid his plate back towards him. ‘And some food.’
Obediently, he picked up his fork and, tasting something delicious, rediscovered his appetite. Sarah cooked the fish, and he found himself eating that too.
Watching her washing up afterwards, he said, ‘I don’t want us to be over.’
She slid a plate slowly into the rack, ‘I’m not sure I’m the right person for you, Joe.’
‘Why?’
She dunked another plate into the water, began to scrub it, then abandoned it. Her eyes fixed on the sink, she said gravely, ‘Because I’m no good at sustaining relationships. Because I start to push people away if there’s a risk of getting too close to them. I get stifled.’
‘But we’ve been fine so far, haven’t we? Given each other plenty of space?’
‘I need to be free. I have to be free.’
‘But I don’t know what you mean by free.’
‘Whatever it is that I haven’t got now.’
There was no answering that, and he didn’t try. ‘Perhaps if we leave it till after Christmas. Think about it again then.’
‘Perhaps.’
But meeting her gaze, he had the feeling she had done all her thinking already.
Her mobile rang five minutes later. She went and answered it in the bedroom. When she came out she had another slip of paper in her hand. ‘On one condition,’ she said, holding the paper out of reach. ‘That you promise to get some sleep before you go.’
‘Promise,’ he said, because he would have said anything just then.
‘And you’ll want to take a photograph of your friend to show around, because it’s not going to be that simple.’ She handed him the paper. ‘It was a phone box.’
He went to the car to fetch a map and found the town west of Hereford, west of Pawsey Farm, on the edge of the Welsh mountains.
‘Black hills and sheep,’ Sarah said.
He slept fitfully until five, with Sarah at his side. He hadn’t thought she’d stay, but without a word she’d led the way into the bedroom and made love with solemn intensity. He had the suspicion it was her way of saying goodbye.
Chapter Seven
He drove through a night of clear skies and dark frost until, nearing the distant country, the land turned white. The snow was thin, it barely covered the open ground, but it reversed the landscape into a photographic negative, white on black. He passed conifer plantations like ink, and bare-limbed woodland like waiting armies, and luminous white fields crisscrossed with black-lace hedgerows. In the distance the border hills were hunched like sleeping ghosts. Once, when he pulled up to read the map, he climbed out into harsh silence and saw a dome of stars so deep and so wide that the universe might have been turned inside out.
He found Pawsey Farm before dawn. It lay off the bend of a lane, up a short track. Leaving the car in the lane, he walked up the rutted track and heard ice snapping beneath his feet.
The house was in darkness, but behind the sturdy five-bar gate he saw the outline of a parked car. Unlatching the gate, he trod on thick gravel and in the stillness each footstep sounded like a pistol shot. The car was a four-wheel drive, very shiny in the starlight. An alarm winked a warning from the dashboard. He went up to the front door of the house and again had the impression of newness, this time from the paint, which glimmered softly. It was almost seven. If there’d been a light showing he would have knocked. As it was, he decided to wait for daybreak. Turning away, he put his nose to a window and saw what looked like a pair of candlesticks on the sill, and, close by, what might have been a chairback.
He remembered this room. It was here they’d had supper, late, round a rickety pine table, with candles that guttered and formed huge spikes. They had eaten roast lamb, almost raw in the middle. They had laughed a lot, they had drunk a lot.
Jenna had been dressed in blue: vivid, beautiful, smiling, but also - the word that came to him was watchful. He saw her sitting at one end of the table, looking down the length of it to Chetwood, alert to everything he was saying, her feline eyes never leaving his face for long. At the time, he had taken this for love.
He was halfway down the track when he glanced back and saw a bright square of curtained light showing in an upstairs window. As he retraced his steps, a glow appeared in the dining room, the diffused reflection of a light in the back of the house. Approaching the front door again, Joe paused by the dining-room window and saw a table in silhouette and a connecting door framing a rectangle of brightly lit kitchen.
He waited, and after a while a woman in a dressing-gown passed across the doorway. She was brown-haired and she was holding a baby against her shoulder. A minute later she passed again, this time with a kettle in one hand.
It wasn’t Jenna, and a part of him argued that he’d never expected it to be.
He thought of asking the woman if she knew anything about the previous inhabitants, but the Chetwoods had only rented the place, it had been more than four years ago, and the woman had a baby to feed.
He drove on north-west in the gathering light, through rolling hills and valleys ruffled with mist. The snow lay thicker here and to the west the Black Mountains were more white than black. There were no cars about, the hamlets showed no lights, and Joe had the impression of going deeper into a deserted land.
For miles the road ran alongside a meandering river which issued vapour like a hot spring, before snaking over a hill and down the other side to join a faster-flowing river. Finally, as both road and river took a long bend to the west, a sign in Welsh and English announced the place from where Jenna had made her call.
It was a small market town, little more than two main streets on the lower slopes of a bluff dominated by a fine castle, half abandoned, half occupied. The houses were small and ancient, or tall and Victorian, in contrasting shades of grey stone or white roughcast with black-rimmed windows and bargeboards, and roofs of grey slate. There was woodland to the south, the bluff close above, and a line of snow-dusted hills to the west, which he supposed to be the Cambrian Mountains.
He followed the one-way system along narrow streets, past a handsome church, and parked in an open square with a small covered market and a free-standing clock-tower, which was stone, Victorian, and built to last. Sweeping away from the clock tower was the appropriately named Broad Street running’
east and parallel to the river
. The south side of the street was set higher on the hill, with a raised pavement and railings and a line of shops. On the north side the pavement was two steps down from the road, with a chapel, a dark hotel, and a scattering of houses which backed on to the river just below.
The place had the stillness of a winter Sunday: no cars and no people.
He walked back to the handsome church along a gritted pavement. The church notices made no mention of a Messiah, only carol services and Midnight Mass and services for Christmas Day. Three services were advertised for today, an ordinary Sunday: communion at nine thirty, family service at eleven and evensong at six thirty, all promising carols. Returning to the square, Joe went to the dark hotel, which had dark wood and dark carpets and a smell of yesterday’s beer. Waiting for his coffee and scrambled egg, he asked the sleepy waitress if the manager could spare a moment, and was met by a spotty blank-eyed youth who introduced himself as the duty manager.
He’d not lived in the town long, he announced quickly, he had no idea if it possessed a choral society nor could he suggest anyone who might know, though when pressed he thought there was no harm in trying Mrs Hopkins, the housekeeper.
Mrs Hopkins, who didn’t look too pleased at being called away from her work, shook her head. Not that she’d heard of, she said. Not in the town itself. She suggested Joe ask at the church.
After breakfast, Joe took a quick walk around the town, and found a visitor centre displaying literature on Offa’s Dyke and the Brecon Beacons National Park, shops with knitwear, china, and gifts, and a Co-op, all closed, and a newsagent’s which was open. A sturdy couple in their fifties were manning the counter. Between them, they seemed to know most of the customers who trickled in. Joe inspected the postcard rack until there was a lull in trade, when he asked the man about a choral society.
The man frowned and immediately referred the question to his wife, who said there was a choir in the church all right, but not a choral society as such. She thought you’d have to go to Hereford or Abergavenny for that.
‘I heard there’d been a performance of the Messiah somewhere hereabouts,’ Joe said.
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