Never Coming Back: a tale of loss and new beginnings

by Deirdre Palmer

  Stop.

  Melody left the rose garden and headed back to the house to fetch the keys to the holiday lets.

  As she crossed the garden, the keys in her hand, her mind returned to Layla. The girl had other calls on her time; she must remember that. The hotel trade could be unpredictable, staffing was difficult. People came and went, especially the foreigners. Naturally Layla had to be flexible, step up when she was needed, and they had a wedding on at the weekend, she’d said. Layla loved her job. She was hardworking and ambitious; it came across clearly in the way she spoke. It was one of her qualities that Melody most admired.

  Layla hadn’t been specific about when she would be free, though; a troubling thought. No other date was ringed in red on the calendar, to be eagerly awaited. Her heart beat faster, sweat broke out on her forehead. It happened every time she thought she might be losing Layla altogether. And then she realised that Layla probably intended coming the weekend after, only she hadn’t said so, either because she’d forgotten or she thought it was obvious. Yes, that would be it. Melody’s mind latched onto this belief and filed it. The anxiety passed.

  The three former stables – named Willow, Hazel and Larch – sat at right angles to one another around a paved courtyard. Last summer, after it happened, Reece had thrown himself into their long overdue refit and redecoration, almost to the point of obsession. Melody remembered endless hours spent alone in the house while he worked on until darkness fell. For some reason, it had never occurred to her to go out and join him. Instead, she would sit, inert, in front of the TV, or take a long bath and go to bed.

  Eventually, Reece would return, and fall, exhausted, into bed, his face an impenetrable mask, his hands a landscape of scrapes and bruises. Refurbishing the holiday lets had been his special project, his way of coping. She’d understood that and tried not to feel abandoned.

  Melody had been granted compassionate leave from her job as an IT systems trainer. She had never gone back. Like everything else, it seemed pointless and, in any case, she was far too tired. She’d lapsed then into a state of inertia, but once she’d managed to pull herself out of it, the stables had become her domain.

  A woman from the village came to clean and do the laundry between bookings. Melody took care of everything else. It gave her a small measure of relief to discover that in some corner of her life she could still be reliable and responsible, that it hadn’t all run away from her entirely. Reece, she suspected, was even more relieved, though he never said.

  Hazel had guests this week – two middle-aged couples from Manchester. The women were sisters, Melody thought. She had overheard them arguing good-naturedly over which couple should have the bedroom and which the sofa-bed in the living room. Larch had an elderly couple from Portsmouth and their dog, a little white terrier with a brown patch over one eye.

  All was quiet as Melody crossed the courtyard. The cars were gone; everyone would be out for the day. Willow, unusually, was unoccupied until Saturday. Letting herself in, Melody passed through the chain of rooms, checking soap dispensers, hanging mugs on hooks, plumping cushions and replacing spent tea lights. Wild daffodils had been left wilting in a jug on the windowsill. Melody threw them in the bin, washed out the jug and replaced it on the sill. Some of the leaflets on the coffee table were dog-eared and out of date. She threw those away, too, making a mental note to drive to the tourist office in Foxleigh and pick up some more. She could do that this afternoon.

  The corner of something poked out from beneath the sofa. She stooped and pulled it out. It was a child’s colouring book, probably belonging to the little girl who’d stayed last week. Danni had loved colouring, had gone through any number of these books. She’d got very cross if she’d crayoned over the lines. Melody felt the sting of threatened tears. She swallowed them back.

  And then, as she’d known would happen, Layla swung back into her mind. Sitting down, Melody took out her mobile and scrolled through her contacts. She mustn’t just let things happen to her, accept the unacceptable. She must take control, as her therapist, Kate, had suggested in that clever, turn-around way of hers that made the words come out of Melody’s own mouth. If she wanted to speak to Layla, there was nothing stopping her.

  Hi, this is Layla. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you.

  Melody waited a moment, then clicked off the phone.

  In the end, she didn’t drive to the village. Instead, she slept the afternoon away in the conservatory, her book on her lap. She seemed to need so much sleep. Kate had not responded when Melody asked why this should be. She had let the question fall into the silence.

  That was the day the session had overrun, which was Melody’s fault because each time the therapist began her summary, she had panicked and started talking about something else. It didn’t faze Kate, of course. Nothing did. Except when the keypad on the door had clicked and buzzed, and a tall, fair-haired, rather good-looking young man put his head round, muttered ‘sorry’ several times and closed the door again. Colour had flown inexplicably to Kate’s cheeks. Letting the pen she’d been holding fall to her lap, she’d grabbed a strand of that glorious red hair and twisted it around her finger, quite manically. Melody’s instinct had been to ask if she was all right, but the focus shifted again, dramatically and expertly, back to Melody herself and the moment was gone.

  The bereavement counselling she’d had at the beginning had helped a little, but the effect hadn’t lasted. The extra therapy sessions had begun six months ago, suggested by Melody’s GP – in desperation, she suspected – as she sat silently before him and waited for a miracle. The clinic, attached to a large district hospital, was twenty miles south of Foxleigh, on the outskirts of the seaside town of Haverstone. It might not be on the doorstep, but it had the best reputation. And Melody was lucky to get an appointment so soon, her GP had pointed out when she’d seemed doubtful.

  ‘Yes, I know. Thank you,’ Melody had said.

  She hadn’t felt lucky. She hadn’t felt anything. Reece hadn’t had counselling or therapy. He had never inferred that Melody was in some way weak because she needed these things, but that didn’t stop it being the truth.

  If Reece was disappointed that Layla wasn’t coming on Saturday, he didn’t show it. It might have helped if he had, but Melody had learned not to expect it. He was a bit quieter than usual for a while after she told him. Then, while she was standing at the kitchen island, slicing onions and carrots for a casserole, he approached her as he might approach the dentist’s chair, put his arms stiffly around her and said she wasn’t to worry because Layla would be back, if not the following week then soon.

  Even in Reece’s dutiful embrace, Melody felt his absence more strongly than if he’d been out of the house.

  Later, she said, ‘We must think of something we can do for Layla.’

  Reece looked up from his newspaper and frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘She comes from nothing, which means her opportunities are limited.’

  Reece put the paper aside and looked hard at Melody. ‘Where do you get these ideas, Mel? They don’t come from Layla, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Not directly, no, but you’ve only got to listen to what she says.’ Did Reece ever listen to what Layla said? He seemed so preoccupied, sometimes, that he might as well not be in the room. ‘Her mother works on a supermarket checkout; those sisters of hers sound like nothing but trouble and they’re only hairdressers. She wants to work in the States and get some really good experience, and eventually open her own restaurant. What kind of help is she going to get from that sort of family? Precious little, I should imagine.’

  ‘Imagine’s about right,’ Reece muttered, getting up from his chair.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Nothing. Look…’ Reece sighed. He looked tired and bewildered.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s got into me today.’ Melody reached up and touched his arm as he stood uncertainly beside her chair. ‘You feel the s
ame as I do about Layla, though. I know you do. You want the best for her, the same as me.’

  ‘Don’t try to run her life for her, that’s all I’m saying, Mel. Anyway, I thought we just did something for her. Five hundred quid, remember?’

  ‘Which she won’t use. She made that pretty clear.’

  ‘There you are, then.’ Reece raised his hands in a gesture of exasperated triumph. ‘She doesn’t want our help. She doesn’t want anything from us. Why should she?’

  Melody felt drained and near to tears. ‘It was the birthday card, the words on the front. It wasn’t only about the money; it was the card. I didn’t set out to buy it. I saw it on the rack in the shop and it spoke to me. I knew it was a mistake as soon as I saw her face when she opened it, but I wanted her to know how I, we, feel about her, that we love her almost as if she was our daughter.’

  ‘Yes, well, that was quite a shock for me, too. For Christ’s sake, Melody, what were you thinking? I’m fond of the girl, of course I am, and I like her coming here, she brings a bit of life to the place, but don’t pile on the pressure. Don’t make her feel guilty, otherwise she won’t come at all.’

  ‘Don’t lecture me, Reece. I’m not one of your students.’

  ‘I’m not…’ Reece ran a hand across his head. He lowered his voice. ‘I’m not lecturing you. I’m only trying to stop you being any more hurt than you already are, that’s all.’

  Melody sighed. ‘Sometimes I think I’m hurting for both of us.’

  Reece backed away, his eyes narrowing. ‘Oh no, Mel. No. Don’t ever say that.’

  Shaking his head in disbelief, he crossed to the door.

  ‘And so you run away,’ Melody murmured, half to herself.

  ‘I’m going to do some marking, as it happens.’

  The door closed firmly behind him.

  ***

  Reece closed a second door – the one to his study on the other side of the hall – and dropped into the tapestry wing chair that had weathered the storm of Melody’s threats to take it to the council tip and emerged, victorious, to continue its shabby existence.

  Sinking further into the upholstery, he felt the comfortingly familiar graze of scratched threads as he rubbed his palms across the balding patches on the arms. He could swing for that girl! Didn’t she realise how much worse she’d made Mel’s life by cancelling next weekend, and how much worse his would be as a result? He’d a good mind to get her on the phone, tell her to get her backside over to Foxleigh and stop being so bloody selfish. What did mere work matter compared to the agonies brought on by her thoughtlessness? And, to add insult to injury, she was now sitting on a cheque for five hundred big ones, courtesy of yours truly! Honestly, he could kick her, he really could.

  Raising his hands in an exaggerated gesture, he slammed them down again, hard. Dust erupted from the chair arms in volcanic spurts. He took a long breath, letting the adrenaline rush subside, then coughed as the dust reached his nostrils. Right, that was that. All over. He hadn’t meant a word of his internal tirade but it had done its work. The wire stretching between his shoulder blades melted away and his facial muscles relaxed. He got up out of the chair and went to the window to sit down at the desk.

  He could never admit to Melody that a black cloud now hovered over his forthcoming weekend as well as hers. Someone had to strike a balance. Layla was such a sweet girl – an attractive girl; beautiful, some might say. Thoughtful, too, and kind. No wonder Danni had been so fond of her.

  Kindness was Layla’s strength. It was also her downfall. Reece had fully expected the girl to stop coming to see them before now, for contact to dwindle to the odd phone call or email, then to a Christmas card, and then to nothing at all. He’d prepared himself for it. He just wished Mel would see what was right in front of her and do the same.

  Layla had her own life to live. It wasn’t her fault – Reece flinched at this point – that Danni didn’t. Even now it pained him physically to say his daughter’s name, even inside his head. As for saying it out loud, especially in front of Mel, it wasn’t happening. He wondered if Mel spoke her name in those sessions with her therapist. If so, the woman was favoured. She was a stranger, though, relatively speaking, so it didn’t count.

  Reece sat, hands behind his head, staring across the yard at the side of the house towards the wiry compound in which the hens wittered and scratched. Nearby, a blue-painted rabbit hutch sat, empty and silent. For a second Reece could almost believe he saw a furry white head with pink-lined ears emerge, as if to sniff the evening air. It wasn’t a real rabbit. The original, live, occupant of the hutch had been a rather ugly grey rabbit called Smokey which had escaped, probably to meet a gruesome end. His daughter, with heart-squeezing perceptiveness beyond her nine years, had replaced it with the toy because then, she said, she wouldn’t have to face losing another pet.

  Tugging his gaze away, Reece dragged towards him the pile of coursework scripts, found his mark sheet and opened the top script. He peered at the writing which contained mainly English, of a sort, with a smattering of the Greek alphabet thrown in for added colour and confusion. He sighed. At least with mathematics it was mainly figures he had to decipher; other lecturers of this bunch weren’t so fortunate.

  He had marked seven scripts when he caught muted sounds coming from the kitchen; Melody, making tea. Wondering if she would bring him a cup, he thought about what he might say to her if she did. The time passed and she didn’t come.

  He couldn’t pinpoint the moment when their roles had reversed; the realisation had stolen up on him, unannounced. At the beginning, he had clung to Melody, literally and figuratively. His need of her had raged through him like a forest fire, but the flames could only lick the edges of the impervious stronghold his wife had built around herself.

  Denied access, devoid of the continued strength required to break through the barrier, he had drawn back into himself, removing himself as far as possible from her physical and emotional presence; refurbishing the holiday lets had given him reason. Then later, when Mel was ready and had turned to him, seeking him out with the same kind of urgency, he couldn’t respond. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. The moment had passed. He simply didn’t have it in him to give her what she needed. Whether, subconsciously, he wanted to punish her, he had never been able to work out. Not that he had tried; he was a mathematician, not a psychologist. He would leave that one for the experts.

  His thoughts winged back to that night last summer; a night of ringing phones, and car headlights pooling on brickwork, and lowered eyes, and thick-soled shoes scuffing politely at the doormat, and tea left to go cold. He remembered the smooth, cold feel of the steering wheel trapped beneath his hands, Melody in the passenger seat, and the quaking shudder of her silent, dry-eyed sobs. He remembered raising a hand in greeting to the driver of the tractor they’d passed in the dawn-drenched lane, as if it were an ordinary morning. And he remembered that, on their return the following afternoon, they discovered they’d left the front door unlocked and the back door wide open. They’d quipped to one another about how lucky they were not to have been cleaned out, because there seemed nothing else to say.

  He remembered all the tiny, unimportant things, but not the actual event, the culmination of the two hundred mile drive. In theory, the journey had been unnecessary because by the time they arrived, Layla had already formally identified her. The police had wanted to hurry things along. Layla was there; she was Danni’s best friend.

  But they wanted to see her, even though the formalities had been completed. Of course they did; she was their daughter. To go away without seeing her would have felt like abandonment of the highest degree. In the end, having made their intentions clear, they were kept waiting for what seemed an extraordinary length of time, during which he felt he’d entered some kind of parallel universe. The woman who kept friendly guard on the bench beside them wore sparkly earrings, as if she’d forgotten to take them off after a night out; miniature silvery cascades that swung to a
nd fro as she glanced up and down the grey corridor. The woman offered Melody her hand to hold. Melody had smiled unhappily and kept her hands firmly to her sides.

  Reece remembered all these things but nothing of how it was, what he’d seen, once they were led inside the room; it had been wiped clean from his memory.

  The television went on in the other room. The level tones of the newsreader brought Reece back to the present. If Melody was waiting up for him, she was in for a disappointment; he had at least a dozen pieces of coursework left to mark and he planned to finish them tonight. Mentally kicking himself for the mean thought but with no desire to retract it, he jotted a figure in the mark box against the student’s name on the sheet and turned to the next script.

  Chapter Four

  Morgan Hampshire stared out of the window at the churning waves, and felt the familiar stab of anxiety. What was it about the sea that made people crazy to live within spitting distance of it? It was only a body of water, mostly empty of anything interesting.

  It had been Kate’s choice, this flat on the third floor of a sharp-edged block with nondescript double-glazed windows and aquamarine frosted glass balconies. He kind of understood why she liked it. Kate’s family home was in Milton Keynes, and she’d lived in London for a fair amount of time; a sea view was a novelty for her. Morgan had been brought up in Suffolk, in a house literally yards from the beach – the ideal playground for a child. But for some reason he couldn’t quite fathom, he really didn’t like the seaside any more. He would much rather have moved somewhere inland – there were plenty of other places within reasonable distance of Kate’s work – but he hadn’t said anything because he loved her and wanted her to be happy.

  Rivers, now they were different. There was nothing daunting about them. He liked rivers, especially the May, at Maybridge, for which he’d developed a slightly embarrassing fondness. The loft above the disused boathouse, its view of the river obscured only by willow fronds, was the only place where he made any real progress with his writing.