Wildfell

by Sam Baker

  ‘How do you do?’ He tried not to stare over the top of her head; but a lifetime of being at least a foot taller than most women meant he couldn’t help looking like he was feigning interest, even when he wasn’t.

  ‘We’ve met, actually,’ Liza said, taking his hand and shaking it firmly enough to drag his attention down to her eye level. ‘More than once. You won’t remember.’

  There was nothing to say. No point pretending otherwise.

  ‘New Year’s Eve, a few years ago, before …’

  ‘Ah,’ Gil nodded, saving her the trouble. ‘Before my divorce.’

  ‘No, actually, I was going to say before mine.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t, uh …’ Gil took refuge in his pint.

  ‘Of course not. Why would you? Busy man, by all accounts.’

  Gil raised his eyebrows. No need to ask by whose accounts. It was obvious. By the accounts of the woman standing next to her, smiling complacently. Margaret Millward was this far from patting her hair. One down, her expression said. And it suddenly dawned on Gil why she’d been so insistent he come. Nothing to do with the newcomer and everything to do with the divorcee standing directly in front of him. He was eligible-ish, slim-ish (instinctively Gil breathed in, hated himself for it), had his own house and most of his own hair. He was probably the only single man in the village under eighty who still fell into the ‘Would’ category, if he wasn’t flattering himself. Turned out, he wasn’t there for the entertainment after all. He was the support act.

  The social started to thin out about eight, around about the time it became evident to everyone, even Mrs Millward, that the newcomer hadn’t taken up her invitation. The usual conversations about golf, the parish council, and teenagers drinking cider and doing who knew what else behind the war memorial had dried up.

  By nine, thank God, The Bull was back to normal.

  The tables were dragged back to their usual positions in the corners and around the fake fire; a hard-core of evening regulars propped up the bar and a smattering of walkers tucked into assorted things with chips in baskets. Retro, they probably thought, little knowing The Bull had been doing things in baskets since Moses and wasn’t likely to stop any time soon. Gil sat himself at his usual table, Liza’s phone number scribbled on a bar mat that dragged like a boulder in his jacket pocket. He hadn’t asked, she’d offered, around the time she’d said she should be making a move and he’d said, ‘See you again sometime.’ Politeness, wilfully mistaken for intent. Social niceties always did get you into trouble in his experience. She seemed nice, it wasn’t that. It was just that … Well, he wasn’t looking.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Millward’s voice pulled Gil back, from the far side of the room where she nursed the same half-full glass of now warm white wine she’d been holding when he arrived. The same peach lipstick decorated the rim. ‘I call that plain rude, don’t you?’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t get the invitation,’ her husband said gently.

  Unlikely, Gil thought. For a second it looked as though Margaret agreed and was about to say as much, but then she relented.

  ‘You could be right. I should have popped round again when she’d had a day or two to settle in. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re new to a neighbourhood. Or she could simply have lost her way.’

  Nobody pointed out that only one road ran through the village and the pub was on it. The same road that ran right past the gates to the big house. You could get lost, Gil supposed, but he couldn’t for the life of him think how.

  The next couple of days crawled by as most days had since the end of August. Gil got up with his alarm, as he did every day, dressed in his suit, as he did every day, and went to collect his regular order of milk, bread, papers, fags from the General Stores, as he did every day.

  The only difference was the weather. Now the rain had finally stopped, the September mornings were growing darker, the evenings shorter, each day starting with dew and ending with an unexpected chill. He could see how giving up on things might happen. With nothing to make you, one day you might not bother to get up. Not until nine or even ten; and then the eight a.m. ritual would be broken. Would the suit be next? Just about flinging on his civvies in time for pub opening, barely managing to push a flannel round his face …

  Yes, he could see how that could happen. A gradual erosion of routine that led … unintentionally his eye drifted to number 32. Since his wife had died, Bill’s life had shrunk. The Bull was the atom at its heart. At noon Bill was at the door, waiting to be let in, back again at six. If the landlord didn’t insist on keeping to the old hours, calling time at three Monday to Thursday, he’d probably never leave. As it was, Bill was always last out, drowning his dregs, calling for one more for the road and being gently refused.

  Gil didn’t examine too closely how he knew the minutiae of Bill’s comings and goings, he just knew Bill made him uncomfortable.

  Bill had kids, Gil knew that much. Presumably he still saw them. But why assume that? Gil had kids, but he wasn’t exactly round Lyn’s every weekend for tea. In fact, he’d be hard pushed to remember when he’d last seen her.

  When he’d last heard from her.

  Christmas, that would be. Plus a birthday card in May, the obligatory note saying you must drop over, you wouldn’t recognise the kids, etc. … He never took it as a real invitation, hadn’t for a year or two, maybe more. Then a text saying thank you for the kids’ birthday cards (cheque for £50, recently raised from £40, accompanied by a feeling that probably wasn’t enough and the definite sense he could no longer say with any degree of certainty how old they were).

  Karen was another matter altogether. Gil didn’t know where to start with her. He wasn’t even 100 per cent sure what she looked like now; although since she’d been the spit of her mother as a little girl he imagined he could pick her out in a line-up. Truth be told, it depressed him just thinking about Karen. Oh, her mother knew her address … But then what? Turn up on Karen’s doorstep and say he was sorry how things turned out? As far as he knew, he was no longer Dad to her. That honour went to the man who’d fed and clothed her for the past twelve years. ‘The man who gave a damn.’ That’s how Jan put it the last time he phoned, her voice brittle, exasperated, done.

  It was years ago now, but the damage, even then, was already done.

  ‘Just get Karen,’ he’d said for the third time in as many minutes, his hand gripping the receiver he’d used instead of his mobile so she couldn’t screen his number. ‘Just for five minutes. I haven’t spoken to her for months.’

  ‘Whose fault is that?’

  ‘She could have called me. She’s got hands, hasn’t she? A mobile phone.’

  Nothing. Silence. He didn’t blame her. Didn’t now, hadn’t then.

  ‘I just. Want. To speak. To my daughter.’ His voice was rising, he couldn’t help it, even though he knew the rest of the top table at the paper were pretending not to listen in.

  The sigh on the other end, hundreds of miles away at the far end of the M1, must have been audible all the way to production. ‘Well, she doesn’t want to speak to you.’

  And then, his big mistake. ‘I have a right to speak to her. I’m her father.’

  ‘She’s sixteen. She gets to choose and she chooses not. You don’t have any rights, not where she’s concerned. And, even if you did, you’re not her father, not any more. Kevin is. He’s the man who gives a damn.’

  The call ended with him standing at his office desk, breathing hard into the static of a dead line, his vision blurring and heart hammering as he thought of all the things he wanted to say. Like an idiot, not one of them was sorry. That conversation wasn’t something he was proud of. Looking back, he wasn’t sure how he’d let it happen. The same way he let everything happen, he supposed. Lost: one marriage and two children. One careless owner. It would take more than a Christmas card to put it right with Karen. God knew he’d tried that route enough times.

  Up ahead, Gil saw Bill’s familiar shape vanishing through
The Bull’s front door.

  ‘Dot of twelve,’ he muttered, side-swerving into the doorway of the General Stores. Sugar, that was it, he was out of sugar. If not sugar, something else. There had to be something he needed. Something that would stop him being through the door of The Bull five seconds after the local joke.

  ‘It’s not catching, you know,’ Gil told himself. ‘You can’t get old and sad and unwashed and drunk by osmosis.’ But he couldn’t shake the fear that … Well, what if you could? He was only sixty-one. Bill Grimes had a good ten years on him, if not more. But somehow Gil was horribly afraid that Bill Grimes was his future. His ghosts of Christmases, springs, summers, autumns and pints yet to come. The spectre of the wreck Gil Markham could be if he didn’t cave in and take up golf or book a cruise or do whatever it was retirees like him were meant to do to keep themselves sane.

  Voluntary retirement, he thought bitterly. What a joke. Nothing bloody voluntary about it.

  He bought sugar, in case he’d really run out, and a magazine about the Dales he hadn’t seen before and suspected wouldn’t be around for more than a couple of issues. Just as he was closing the door behind him, a battered Peugeot 205 squealed to a near halt. If there’d been a pavement the car would have mounted it. As it was, it lurched to a stop centimetres from his feet.

  ‘What the …?’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. I only just got this and its brakes don’t seem to work very well.’

  The young woman who threw open the driver’s door, almost doing him a second injury, looked harassed, a bit like Lyn when she’d had her babies under each arm. Although this woman was minus babies. On second glance, she didn’t look much like Lyn at all. For a start, Lyn was blonde, bottle-blonde these days, or had been last time he saw her, and this girl – woman, he corrected himself – had wavy brown hair to her shoulders, and freckles. She did have Lyn’s slender build though, the same harassed air and perplexed V between her eyebrows that he’d already told Lyn would set into wrinkles with age. In her nondescript jeans, trainers and parka, without a scrap of make-up, she could have been ten years younger than his daughter. The lines radiating from her eyes suggested she was older.

  ‘Or at all,’ she added, as if she hadn’t paused. ‘Plus I’m a crap driver. And I hate cars.’

  Gil started to smile, opened his mouth to tell her it really didn’t matter, no one was dead, but she was already gone, pushing past him into The Stores as if working to a deadline. With nothing better to do, Gil followed.

  ‘Back again so soon, Mr Markham?’ Mrs Millward said it as if someone had pressed F8 on a computer keyboard and this was the default line. Gil forced a smile and was wondering whether he could be bothered to answer when he saw that she wasn’t looking at him any more. Her mega-watt attention swivelling to the woman who’d entered ahead of him.

  If Margaret Millward had been a teacher she’d have been one of those who could silence a class just by looking up from her desk. She had that effect now. Even Jeremy Vine, blaring from the radio behind the till, seemed to ratchet his voice down a little in deference. ‘Mademoiselle Graham?’ There was a pause. A split second when every head in the shop – and there weren’t that many – turned to look at the newcomer, then a beat, perhaps two, before he saw the woman’s shoulders visibly tense through the thin fabric of her coat.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Mrs Millward’s voice was triumphant. ‘It’s Mademoiselle Graham, the new tenant up at Wildfell. I knew we’d get to see you eventually.’

  6

  Who?

  That was Helen’s first thought.

  She almost looked behind her, then she realised there was no need, everyone in the shop was transfixed by just one person: her.

  As she opened her mouth and then closed it again, another thought occurred to her: How the hell did the woman know she was her?

  Not that anyone with half a brain couldn’t have worked it out by process of elimination, she supposed. Who she was, that is. But not what she looked like. How had this bossy little woman put two and two together and come up with Helen? In a village alive with passing traffic, which, for the past week, she had tried so hard not to be part of …

  Not one to be put off, the woman kept staring pointedly. Well? said her expression. Well?

  The small shop swam with faces. Helen felt the air constrict, her brain doing a go-slow while she tried to take them in. The blanking thing was an all too common occurrence these days. She couldn’t think straight. But it was obvious which of the faces staring at her, watching and waiting, mattered. The busybody behind the till. Helen could tell just by looking that she – Margaret Millward, it had to be, she of the village social – was the very worst kind. Not harmless, that’s for sure. Pathologically interested in other people’s business; now examining someone pathologically interested in not being examined.

  ‘Oui, madame,’ she managed eventually.

  Just her luck there were other people in the shop. Two old women, properly old, purple-tinged hair and dowagers’ humps, both with wire baskets on flimsy wheel-along trollies. A young mum – young-ish, younger than Helen anyway – her old-school pram blocking one of three aisles. Then there was the man. The one she’d nearly run over outside. He was standing right behind her. Towering over her, not cowed by his own height, so she tried not to be. The fact he was lanky helped her not to tense. He was too close for comfort, but it wasn’t his fault. In an attempt to physically remove herself as far as possible from Margaret Millward’s orbit, she’d backed into his space. Close enough to see the pinstripe suit he wore was expensive, tailor-made. Close enough to see he wasn’t as old as she’d first imagined. And close enough, she realised, for him to see how her fists had clenched, jagged nails cutting half-moons into the fleshy part of her palms.

  ‘Parlez-vous anglais?’ he asked.

  The bossy woman behind the counter looked impressed.

  Helen shifted from foot to foot, cursing herself inwardly. A loaf of bread for God’s sake! Outed by a hankering for toast and Marmite. She should have been less greedy and stayed home, or less lazy and driven further. Either would have been better than this.

  Margaret Millward was still looking at her, if anything, her curiosity piqued all the more by Helen’s silence; head tilted to the side, ready to deploy sympathy and understanding the second Helen spoke.

  What Helen wanted to say was, Fuck off. Mind your own business. She wanted to tell the woman where to stick her nose and her General Stores and her only loaf of bread and fresh milk for a five-mile radius. She didn’t, of course. Hélène Graham wasn’t a fuck-off kind of girl. She was bon chic, bon gen. Tough as nails, but with the grandes écoles manners of someone descended from someone with a metro station named after them.

  Her Helen Lawrence fuck-you days were behind her.

  ‘Yes!’ she said brightly, ditching any pretence of a French accent. ‘Fluently.’ There was no point making life harder than it already was by having to pretend to speak pidgin English every time she ran out of milk.

  It was as if the whole shop – even Jeremy Vine who’d been chatting to himself from the transistor behind the till – exhaled and started pretending to go on about its business; pretending being the operative word. They may no longer be looking, but Helen could tell every last one of them was listening. Even the man in the suit, who looked as if he’d escaped from an episode of Yes, Minister and wandered into Emmerdale by mistake.

  ‘You must be Mrs …’ Helen paused, pretending to search for a name that was on the very tip of her tongue if she could only …

  ‘Margaret, dear,’ Mrs Millward said, as Helen had known she would. They always did, her type. ‘Margaret Millward. But you should call me Margaret.’

  To her right, the man’s shoulders shook and then he sneezed, a fake little atishoo, Helen thought, forced out, too little too late. ‘Bless you, Mr Markham,’ said the woman.

  ‘Thank you,’ he muttered.

  At least, Helen thought that was what he muttered.
>
  ‘We were very sorry not to see you, dear,’ Margaret Millward said slowly, clearly determined to persist in her idea that Helen could not understand.

  Helen stared back, trying to keep her face blank. Confused was the look she was after, but rude would do. Anything was better than what she felt, which was thirteen all over again and trapped in the school loos by one of those girls who had the teachers believing butter wouldn’t melt. They were everywhere, life’s Margaret Millwards: plaguing infants’ schools and colleges, offices and school gates – who knew, probably nursing homes too. The type who, when you met them for the first time, looked you up and down, taking you in head-to-toe, every hair out of place, every scrap of mud on your boots, every stain you thought successfully sponged off. That type, thought Helen, but Margaret Millward’s interest felt more dangerous. She wasn’t looking for mud and split ends and smudged mascara. She was looking for the cracks below the surface. Although, God knows, Helen thought, there should be enough cracks on the surface to keep her going.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Helen said, when it became clear that she was about to lose her second face-off of the week. ‘You were expecting me?’

  ‘Thursday evening.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ she repeated.

  ‘I sent you a letter. An invitation.’

  Helen rearranged her face into its best imitation of sudden recognition. ‘The blue letter?’