She touched his sleeve; then his arm went round her and they stood together without speaking. At first she thought only of the comfort of another body warm against hers, sheltering her from the wind; her face was against his jacket, his arms held her, and here was the one person who knew exactly the blend of pain and guilt, anger and bewilderment that held her and wouldn’t let go. It was too cold to linger; they retreated up the beach, still linked, to a notch in the sandy cliff that offered shelter. There they huddled together, embracing like survivors. Their first kiss tasted of salt, his tears and her own; then hands reached and grasped and slid inside clothing, and her breath quickened with his. Her head swam with the certainty that Roland was here too; that they were doing this for him.
Chapter Sixteen
Ruth thought that the weekend would be soon enough for Anna to move to Rowan Lodge, but Anna insisted on going the next evening. Ruth drove her there, taking her bags and some kitchen equipment, regretting now that they’d emptied the cupboards so efficiently and given so much to charity shops. An old bike was strapped to the roof of the car; Ruth said that she hardly used it any more and certainly wouldn’t miss it. When they arrived, she checked the oil tank and got the boiler going, turned on an electric fire and showed Anna the central heating controls. ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right? The phone’s disconnected, but call me on your mobile if we’ve forgotten anything.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Anna said, although at that moment she was wishing more than anything that she could go back with Ruth and sit in the warmth of the kitchen over a pot of coffee. She’d forgotten how dark it was here at night, without street lights, and so few other houses nearby. Still, she’d chosen this; she couldn’t change her mind now. The house was frigid with winter and neglect, but – to Anna’s relief – held less of Bridget’s presence than it had on her first visit. She didn’t want to share with Bridget.
‘Coffee, tea, bread, milk, yoghurt, cheese, butter.’ Ruth unpacked a cardboard box. ‘It seems a bit like camping, but I can always come over tomorrow night and take you to the supermarket in Epping.’
‘You’ve got enough to do,’ Anna told her. ‘I don’t want to be an extra burden.’
‘You’re not. I’ll miss you! It’s been fun having you to stay.’
‘Thanks again, for everything.’ They went to the door together, and hugged; Anna felt suddenly tearful as Ruth went out to the car. Backing out to the lane, Ruth waved, and pulled away up the hill. Although it meant letting precious warmth out of the house, Anna stood watching from the open door until the car’s rear lights were quite out of sight.
Silence and darkness settled around her like a cloak. She remembered telling Jamie that she was waiting for something, though she didn’t know what. Maybe this was the way to find out. In spite of her doubts earlier, she felt oddly comforted, contained in her own stillness. I can’t live in London, she thought. I need trees, quietness, space, a garden. I should have known.
Her attention was caught now by the stars: how startling they were, how brilliant, with no intrusive streetlamps to blot them out, no lit buildings apart from the cottage behind her. It felt like a gift, a dazzling display, a blessing on this new phase of her life. There they were in their slow wheeling, which Rose had said you could almost see if you stood for long enough, east horizon to west. And there to the south stood Orion, the bold, unmistakable pattern of belt and sword and raised arm that Anna had known since childhood. He towered high, dominating the southern sky. Turning, Anna saw patterns and clusters, more and more stars pricking through until she felt she could fall into them, and her neck ached with tilting. There weren’t many more constellations she could identify: the Plough, the wide W of Cassiopeia, and – yes – the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, in the horned shape of Taurus. She remembered that.
How many stars can you count?
Seven. Seven Sisters.
No, more than seven. Don’t look straight at them. Look to one side, so you can catch them out.
But the more you look, the more you can’t see, and the Rose of her imagination was there beside her, so close that Anna ought to be able to reach out and grab her by the wrist and not let go. Rose, who always knew more, always several steps ahead.
‘Where are you?’ Anna asked, and was startled to realize that she’d spoken aloud, and that she was alone in the dark, with Ruth gone, and the empty house behind her.
Going in, she turned the key in the door and slid the bolt across – no multi-point locking here – then made up her bed, with the sheet and duvet cover Ruth had lent her. She’d decided that it would be too creepy to sleep in Bridget’s double bed, and was installing herself instead in the smaller room overlooking the garden, the one Ruth had used whenever she stayed. Sometime this week, one lunch time, she’d go back to the flat and collect more of her clothes, CDs and toiletries. Smuggle them out, perhaps, bit by bit, till she had all her belongings here? But if this was a final separation from Martin, as it seemed to be, she ought to tell him, and make it definite. She would have to find the words for that – words that wouldn’t yet come, but how could it be done without them?
Staying here for a while would make it easier. She thought of herself, Ruth and Martin as marker-pins on a map, forming an elongated triangle. At a proper distance from each other.
August 1990
The Wednesday of Rose’s leaving divided everything into Before and After. It was the day when normal life stopped being safe, predictable, even boring, and became something too big and terrifying to endure.
Time thickened like treacle. Anna floundered through it in a daze. Everything was too brightly coloured, too loud, too bewildering. There were things like meals, and bed, and deciding what clothes to wear, but it all felt irrelevant. There was another girl doing these things; looking, to any observer, like the usual Anna.
A whole day went by, and another. It began to feel normal to have police in the house – at first two male sergeants and a WPC, later the WPC on her own. Photographs were produced, a description written. There were questions, questions. How had Rose seemed? What had she been wearing? What did they think she’d taken with her? Anna and her mother tried to work out what was missing from the wardrobe, but could only say what Rose hadn’t taken: not the crochet sandals, not the appliquéd denim skirt, not the floaty green top. Her bag had gone, with her purse in it. No one knew how much money the purse had held. Anna told them that Rose had been drawing that morning, but her sketchbook seemed to have gone with her.
The house was suspended in time, waiting. The air felt still, too still. Something awful’s happened. The thought kept nudging at Anna’s brain. Something so awful I can’t think about it. At the same time she expected Rose to come back, surprised to find everyone anxious and agitated. The straining of ears and will to hear Rose’s key in the lock, her usual clattering entry with bags and art folder, was a physical ache.
Dad went to school to collect Rose’s exam results. The envelope sat on the mantelpiece for three days before Mum opened it so that they could tell her if she phoned. She’d got her three As; there should have been celebrations. The phone kept ringing: both lots of grandparents, Rose’s friends, the police. Every time the phone rang, Mum’s eyes seemed to darken, her body to shrink into itself, but usually it was only someone asking for news, or the police confirming that there was no news. There was nothing.
‘A girl with three A grades has got enough brains to keep herself out of trouble,’ Dad kept saying, repeating it like a mantra.
After a whole interminable first week, the police phoned. There was a body that might be Rose. The body of a teenage girl, washed up on a beach near Whitstable. Anna’s parents were required to go and identify it.
That evening lodged in Anna’s memory, thrillingly awful. Mum and Dad getting ready to go, talking to each other in shaken, subdued voices, speaking for the comfort of keeping some things ordinary: ‘Are you ready, love? Got your keys? Hadn’t you better take your coat? It’ll be cold later.�
�� Beneath the talking, each of them was shut up with the horror of what was to come.
Anna didn’t go with them. Gran and Grandad Skipton came over, to stay with her while Mum and Dad were driven to a morgue or hospital or police station; Anna wasn’t sure where they had to go. She watched the police car drive slowly down the road and out of sight, and stayed there at the window, breathing on the glass, pulling the curtains round her like a shawl. She wanted to hold tightly to the last minutes of Rose still being alive. She knew from television how it would be. Someone quiet and respectful would pull back a sheet, and there would be Rose’s drowned face, bruised and swollen from being in the water. Dad would say in a quavering voice, ‘Yes, that’s her, that’s Rose,’ and Mum would break down in terrible racking sobs. Rose would be covered up again, the sheet touching her eyes, her mouth. The fabric would shape itself to her face, covering the bruises and the swelling. She would be unblemished again, untouched. She would be one of those stone effigies in cathedrals, the folds falling gracefully from her limbs. Time would lose its meaning, and she’d be fixed like that for ever, a girl of stone.
Anna’s reflection stared back at her from the blackness of outside. It swam and blurred and became Rose’s drowned face, with staring eyes. Anna tugged the curtains together to shut her out. She went back to sprawl on the carpet, the TV on for company. None of them could settle, but Gran and Grandad were trying to pretend that things were normal, for Anna. ‘I can’t ask them, I can’t,’ Anna had heard Mum whispering to Dad. ‘It’s Roland all over again. I can’t put them through that. It’s too terrible to think about.’
But the grandparents had offered, and now here they were, moving about the house slowly, as if too much vigour might propel Rose out of the shadows where she’d been lurking, and into some otherworld.
When the phone rang, Gran jumped visibly. She and Grandad looked at each other; Gran said in a whisper, ‘I’ll go.’ She went through to the hall, closing the door behind her. Anna turned her eyes back to the TV, to a cartoon that normally she’d have sneered at as babyish. A dog with ears flapping like streamers was loping along a road in big bouncing strides, not seeing the steamroller coming along behind. The steamroller caught up, flattening the dog into a cut-out shape on the road, like Mum’s paper dress patterns – a meaningless cartoon death that was forgotten next moment when the dog stood up and shook itself back into shape and carried on running. Anna didn’t look round when Gran came back into the room. As long as she kept staring at the screen, she could hold back the moment of knowing.
‘It’s not Rose. It’s not her. Oh, lovey.’ Gran stooped and gathered Anna into her arms, expecting her, Anna supposed, to cry with relief. Anna felt no urge to cry. She struggled free and ran out into the back garden. When she looked up at the sky there were stars pushing through the blackness, more and more of them as her eyes adjusted, till the sky was a pincushion pricked with dots of light. The stars were bigger than she was. She wanted to shout to them, leap up and catch one. The Seven Sisters were somewhere out there, the Pleiades, blurring and dancing together, uncountable.
There was still a poor drowned girl lying under that sheet, someone’s daughter, someone’s sister perhaps, but she wasn’t Rose. She had taken Rose’s place. Her death confirmed that Rose was alive and running.
Chapter Seventeen
The narrow, carpetless flight of stairs and the lingering smells of fat and smoke from the café underneath would have deterred Anna, but the young couple – a girl of about eighteen and her amiable-looking boyfriend – followed her up without comment. The flat on the second floor consisted of a living room with a kitchen at one end, a bathroom and one bedroom; the furnishings were worn but clean. The bedroom window, north-facing, looked out on an expanse of rain-washed brick wall, drainage pipes, and – if you craned your neck – a glimpse of grey sky.
‘Oh, it’s lovely,’ said the girl, who had the air of being ready to be pleased with anything offered to her. ‘Isn’t it, Jace?’
‘Yeah,’ said Jace, slipping his arm round her waist. Anna looked at their bright faces and knew that they were picturing themselves here, cosily watching TV from the sofa; they were thinking of all the sex they were going to have in this bleak narrow bedroom. For a moment, remembering herself and Martin in the Lewisham flat that first time, Anna envied the transparency of their desires. Were they runaways? Did anyone know they were in Leytonstone, looking for a flat? This girl – Kylie, had she said, or Keeley or Kayleigh? – looked wan and undernourished. Well, the café downstairs might be handy for feeding her up.
‘We can afford it, can’t we?’ said the girl, looking appealingly at Jace, her arms draped round him.
‘Course we can,’ said Jace, and Anna saw in the swell of his chest how he wanted to be the man, the provider. ‘We like it,’ he told her. ‘A month’s rent for deposit, right?’
Anna nodded. ‘Good. We’ll go back to the office and sort out the paperwork.’
She was intrigued by such brushings against other lives, always at a point when changes were being made or contemplated, where a new house or flat promised transformation into a different person – happier, more confident, more successful. People imagined that they could leave their old lives behind, moving into new selves with a change of habitat. Often they mentioned their reason for moving – a change of job, a wish to be nearer central London – but with some there was furtiveness, making her suspect that they were evading responsibilities, or trying to escape.
Whenever a missing person reached the headlines and relatives pleaded for information, Anna felt herself reluctantly linked to these desperate seekers, like members of a club. Around them, watching like a host of angels in a medieval painting, were the missing. They talked and whispered together, debating whether or not to return to the human world, bestowing joy and tears of relief on the ones who waited, trapped in limbo. Whenever one of them did come back, Anna felt resentful. The parents or sisters or partners in waiting ought to have served their full sentence alongside her. They had cheated; their lost person, returning, had taken a place that was rightfully Rose’s, as if only a limited number of hostages could return from the underworld.
Over the years, Anna found in every teenage girl a potential Rose. It had become a habit, gazing at them, wondering where they came from, where they were going, who cared for them and what they expected from their lives. As Anna matured, girls of eighteen looked younger and younger, until, now, they were a different generation, a separate, exotic breed. Girls in groups, girls on the Underground, girls out shopping together, girls aware of their sexiness and the glances they attracted. With their glossy hair, their smooth skin, their supple bodies, their distinctive fashions, they assumed a confidence Anna couldn’t recall in herself at that age. They intimidated her, the way they kept coming, year by year, wave upon wave of teenage girls pushing her aside. They jostled and giggled, elbowing Rose’s ghost out of their way.
Waking in her room at Rowan Lodge, Anna was puzzled first by the absence of another body, then by the flowered curtains, the window in an unfamiliar place, the silence.
The room was cold; she felt the chill at her neck and shoulders as she stirred, looking at her watch. A quarter to eight. About to scramble up in panic, she remembered that it was Monday, and her day off, as she’d worked on Saturday. She huddled the duvet around her for a few minutes more, then got out of bed, wrapped herself in her dressing gown and pushed her feet into slippers. Opening the curtains, she rubbed at the windowpane with her sleeve and stared in surprise at the garden trees all ghostly with frost, the grass whitened and crisp. For a moment she thought that it had snowed overnight; but no, it was hoarfrost, misting the air, blurring the horizon so that the parkland beyond the garden rose whitely into cloud. So still; so quiet. She caught her breath at the unexpected beauty. Tracks left by some small animal crossed the lawn and headed under the shrubs; a blackbird landed on a tree-branch and particles of frost descended in a shower.
‘Are you ma
d?’ Martin had asked, when she phoned to tell him she was moving here. ‘Why maroon yourself in a godforsaken hovel miles from anywhere, when you could be at home?’
‘It’s hardly a hovel. And I want to be miles from anywhere.’
‘Miles from me, at any rate – that’s obvious. Why not do the whole thing and take yourself off to a Buddhist monastery?’
‘Great idea! Thanks. I’ll try to find one.’
Martin huffed. ‘What’s behind all this? If you’ve met someone else, for God’s sake why not say so?’
‘I haven’t!’ She felt stung by this. ‘If I had, d’you think I’d move him into Ruth’s mum’s house?’
‘Anna – it’s quite beyond me to predict what you are or aren’t likely to do. Let me know when you’ve had enough and I’ll come and fetch you home.’
She felt impatient with him. Why was he being so tolerant? How far would he let himself be pushed, before saying That’s it, then – we’re finished, and cutting off the possibility of return? Was that what she was waiting for – Martin to make the decision, so that she didn’t have to?
Ruth had been concerned that Anna would find the cottage too isolated, but instead she relished her solitude. Between them they had finished clearing the main bedroom and had bought paint; Anna planned to get on with stripping the wallpaper today, but after making toast and coffee she decided to go out walking instead; the frozen beauty of the landscape was a gift that needed acknowledging. Among Bridget’s remaining books she had found a large-scale Ordnance Survey map; she had only trainers to wear, no walking boots or wellies, but the ground was too frozen to be muddy.
For more than two hours she walked, frosted grass crunching underfoot, her breath clouding in the air. She found her way along bridleways and across fields, and along hedgerows where startled pheasants whirred clumsily into flight. She paused to study her map, scanning for the next stile, the next marker post; she walked along a single-track lane where a horse and rider were the only traffic to pass, steam rising from the horse’s clipped flanks. A thin, wheedling call of birds caught her attention and she looked across the whited-out fields to see a flock of birds flying low, their wing-tips rounded and dark, flicking black-white-black as they wheeled and landed. Lapwings. Peewits. They reminded her of the holiday in Blakeney, the pleasure she’d taken in the abundant birdlife and had since forgotten. Only the distant motorway hum reminded her that she was less than an hour from central London. It was years since she’d done this, and she realized that it filled a need she’d been unaware of: to be alone, walk among trees, see the sky uncluttered by buildings; to feel space around her and in her.
Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon Page 21