Wildfell

by Sam Baker

  The drizzle was hardening, the wind growing squally and the cloud coming so low Gil felt he should hunch, or un-hunch completely and stand his full height and let the nimbus scrape his head at the point where his hair was thinning. Common sense said turn back; but Gil had no intention of listening to common sense. He needed to think. Indoors was hopeless. He felt … confined. More so, since the cottage was empty. The rooms were too small, the ceilings too low; he’d like to moan that the walls were too thin but, having seen the thickness of the walls Jan had taken a hammer to, he knew the only way you’d hear easily through that would be to tunnel through it. Hunching his head further into his neck, his neck into his shoulders, he pressed on, ignoring the give beneath his soles.

  The gossip had been predictable enough, at least to start with.

  ‘Well, what a piece of luck,’ Margaret Millward was saying. ‘If Mademoiselle Graham hadn’t come in we’d never have known our invitation was destroyed.’

  What was with all the we? Gil wondered. It was Margaret’s social, Margaret’s invitation, Margaret’s injured feelings. As if anyone else gave a toss.

  People’s ability to believe what they wanted despite all evidence to the contrary never failed to astonish him. It was one of the things that had made his job so easy when he’d been a reporter. Self-delusion, a journalist’s best, not to mention cheapest, friend.

  ‘Hard to believe she’s been living here over a week and she’s not passed through before,’ said the woman with the pram. Youngish, blondish, skin so pale it was bordering on transparent, her eyes rimmed with tale-telling dark circles of four hours’ sleep and night feeds. Gil thought she might have been at school with one of his daughters. Mind you, that went for nearly every woman in the village between twenty-five and thirty-five.

  When he’d been gainfully employed he’d lived here for years without passing through. He could see the attraction.

  ‘Looks like she decided against bringing the child then,’ Mrs Millward said suddenly. That got everyone’s attention firmly back where she liked it.

  Child? Gil looked at her, mouth open. Where the hell had she got that?

  ‘Not sure where I heard it now,’ Margaret Millward continued, as if reading his mind. ‘Gwen got it from the letting agent, I think, something about a little boy. But I’ve heard no mention of it since. Good job too, if you ask me. No place for a child, that big old house … No place for anyone.’

  ‘Do you really think it’s haunted, Margaret?’ The young woman gave an involuntary shudder as she emptied her purse on to the counter and started counting out change. ‘I mean, if someone’s actually seen something up there, shouldn’t the estate agent have told her?’

  ‘I don’t think they’re obliged,’ the store owner said authoritatively. ‘Not legally. But you’d think they’d have a moral duty, wouldn’t you? Young woman on her own like that, ought to have all the facts. Especially paying six months up front like she did. She’ll have a hell of a time getting her money refunded.’

  There were murmurs of assent and several other women nodded.

  Gil turned away and rolled his eyes. Not that old Wildfell is haunted shtick again. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. The things some people could concoct to pass the time.

  With his back to the wind, Gil struck a match, cupped its guttering flame in his hand and sucked until tobacco flared orange. Then he inhaled. Deeply. Nothing tasted as good as an illicit fag with no one hovering on his shoulder to keep count.

  The Scar wasn’t an arduous climb from this direction, even with nicotine-drenched lungs and brogues not built for the occasion with leather soles that slid in mud. He was barely breathing hard. The approach had inclined gently, rising to a well-trod path with steps cut into the rear of the Scar, and kept useable by planks at the back of each step, held in place by short stakes at either end. As he crested the top, the Dales dropped away, their swoops and hollows speckled with the red, blue and yellow of ramblers’ anoraks, interspersed with patches dotted with white where sheep clustered together against the weather.

  On a clear day the view from the Scar was breathtaking, no matter how many times you saw it. Today he could barely see as far as the next valley. The rain was settling in for the duration now, splattering his glasses and plastering his hair against his scalp. Blinking away water, Gil removed his spectacles, wiped them with the inside of his scarf, held them up to his eyes and frowned. The smears were worse. Reluctantly he turned for home. He might have walked a few miles to clear his head but he wasn’t getting anywhere with his problem. Whichever way he looked at it – and he’d looked at it every which way – the gossip made little sense, no matter how many times he replayed it. His disquiet was at more than village idiocy. It was his village, after all; he was allowed to dislike it.

  The woman’s level of awkwardness wasn’t natural.

  Well, people with that level of social fear didn’t usually enter crowded shops from choice. Mostly they worked hard not to leave their homes.

  Something about her was definitely off.

  Gil ran through the earliest rumours that had swirled around the village: that she was a French film star come here to die, a rich and recovering Swiss drug addict, a landscape artist in search of solitude and new views. Living all alone in that dodgy old ruin out on the Dales certainly fitted with that last theory.

  Gilbert shook his head, scattering the rain on to his lenses.

  He was as bad as the rest of them.

  As he headed down the slope, Gil cursed the gossip for putting ideas into his head. Cursed himself for listening. But he kept playing the scene in his head one last time, from her near-failure to stop that ruin of a car to her panic at finding herself the centre of attention and not being able to start the car again. He was looking for a variation, a detail he hadn’t noticed the previous five or six times he ran it through. Something that in the old days would have given him the story.

  By the time he reached the main road the rain was coming down hard, puddles forming at the side where a pavement would be if there’d been one. Ordinarily, Gil made a point of walking into the oncoming traffic. ‘Better to see a lorry bearing down on you than only spot it when it hits you from behind.’ That’s what he used to tell his girls. And they’d roll their eyes, ‘Da-ad.’ And make who-is-he-and-why-did-you-marry-him faces at their mother. Today though, Gil hadn’t bothered to cross. It entered his mind, but the puddles were worse that side, the road was deserted and his concentration was shot. Plus his suit was sodden, his brogues full of water and he wanted to be home with a whisky, maybe have a long soak and another shot at that novel. He patted his pocket. The paperback was sodden.

  Why the gossip in the shop nagged at him, he didn’t know. The certainty, he supposed. The willingness to construct stories without evidence. The way, these days, rumour became fact in seconds. Stand it up, that was what he’d been taught as a trainee: why, who, where, what, when, but above all why. That was what he’d passed on to the rookies on the news desk. Even if they did think he was an old fart for going on about it. Even if they did think Wikipedia counted as fact-checking.

  Back. It. Up.

  The gossips hadn’t. They were simply certain. About the woman, about the haunted house, about everything.

  Gil heard the car before he saw it. Only just though. He hurled himself into the hedge; grabbing a branch to stop himself going down, brambles scratching his wrists and tearing the knee of his ruined trousers. Something sharp swiped at his cheek as he fell and he felt rather than saw blood well to the surface.

  ‘Fucking idiot,’ Gil yelled as he pulled himself to his feet.

  He waved a fist ineffectually at the back of the disappearing car. It was pouring now, the light failing and his suit was dark and getting darker the wetter it got. Only his hair was light and that was plastered to his skull. To be fair, the driver would have had little chance of seeing him, but that didn’t lessen the pain in his knee. The car was shrinking away, moving into the dusk. Br
ake lights flared as it approached a bend and something in the rear windscreen caught Gil’s eye. He squinted, whipped off his glasses, swiped at them, and squinted again.

  ‘Gilbert, you silly old sod,’ he muttered, as it vanished around the bend. ‘Get a grip, get a hobby, get something.’ All the same, he could have sworn he saw something – someone, a child, perhaps – staring at him from the back of the small, silver Peugeot.

  8

  By the time she arrived at the house, Helen was already regretting tossing the pay-as-you-go phone. It felt as if someone else had clicked the button to end the call, systematically removed the back of the phone, sliding out the battery and extracting the SIM, bending it this way and that until its spine snapped. On returning to her car, she’d reassembled the phone, turned it on and dropped it into a puddle, then extracted the battery, wiped both phone and battery on her sodden parka and tossed them into separate bins.

  It had to be done. Helen loved her sister but she didn’t trust her. And she was pretty sure the feeling was mutual. All it would take was one moment of weakness or moral rectitude, depending on your perspective. From Fran and Ian’s perspective it would be the latter. It wasn’t until she’d turned the key behind her in the lock and gone through her daily ritual of checking the doors and windows that Helen saw what should have been obvious out on the Dales: a smear, like golden jam, encroaching on her vision. Her fingernails, white earlier, were now turning blue.

  ‘Bugger,’ she muttered under her breath. Usually she had weeks, sometimes more than a month, between bouts of migraine. This time it was barely a week.

  Pills. That was what she needed. If she was quick, she could head off the worst of it. Except the only pills she had were shop-bought and near useless.

  The pills she needed were the ones Dr Harris gave her. (Ms Caroline Harris, she was a consultant now, dropping the Doctor the way consultants do.) Only the last of those was long gone. In the kitchen, the empty packet still lay on the counter where she’d tossed it in frustration days earlier. The pill fairies hadn’t come in the night, it was just as empty as when she’d looked back then.

  Removing her sodden parka, Helen hung it from the corner of the door to the pantry and lit the boiler, holding her hair behind her with her left hand as the match flared in her right. The gas gave a soft boom and at the edges of her vision, lightning crackled.

  After the discoloration in her fingers the lights always came next. Usually she was too busy to notice until worse symptoms forced her to take heed. Her fingers, in the purple glow of the pilot light, looked waxy, a tallow yellow. Helen tried to calculate how long she had before the migraine really kicked in. As much as a day? Not at the rate this was moving in. Hours, more like. For an insane second she considered grabbing her camera and running kit and going back outside while a fraction of light remained. She’d taken some of her best pictures in this dead zone; pre-pain, post-sanity. Blurring vision, nausea and frozen fingers brought with them a remoteness that reversed the emotional binoculars she used to look at the world. What was ordinarily too close, close enough to terrify, became small and distant.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Helen,’ she muttered, imitating her mother. ‘The last thing you need is to be out on the Dales, in the rain, in the full throes of a migraine without medication.’

  Instead, she filled the kettle and made tea.

  She’d made tea all over the world, usually as a way of thinking about something else. There was a mechanical and ritualised element to the British obsession with tea, Helen thought. It had started, her ‘migraine thinking’. She never had these thoughts unless lights threatened the edge of her vision. Once they started she couldn’t stop them until the full force of her migraine roared in. Then she’d shut her eyes, curl into a ball on her side and wait for the pain to stop.

  She’d said exactly that to Caroline once. Caroline had given Helen one of her looks, before replying that when the time was right Helen might want to think carefully about what she’d just said.

  Last time Helen looked, the time still wasn’t right.

  When the kettle had boiled, Helen took her mug and two pieces of hot buttered toast into the upstairs sitting room, using her laptop as the tray. She perched on a dust-stiff Indian throw on a rancid sofa in the upper drawing room of a decaying Elizabethan mansion and ate. There was a whole world of memories in the hot buttered toast.

  Cut into fingers and then into quarters, with crusts on and crusts cut off. After memories of being given hot buttered toast after coming in from a wet and difficult day at the beach, and sitting next to Fran on the sofa and, for once, the two of them not arguing, and memories of eating it late at night in a road side café in Italy when she was covering riots and an election, came another. She was a teenager and her parents were out, Fran was at university, the house was Helen’s, and the list of things she was forbidden to do was pinned to the fridge with an Anchor Butter magnet.

  One of them stood beside her reading the list.

  Tom Bretton.

  She hadn’t thought about Tom much over the last few years. Now he was in her thoughts constantly. She could still remember Tom’s smile, ever so slightly lopsided, the way he made them a single piece of toast for breakfast, buttered it far more carefully than she would have bothered to and cut it neatly down the middle, while she made tea in two Greenpeace mugs they’d bought at a market stall the week before. Helen had done precisely what she’d been told not to do.

  Gone to bed with Tom.

  Nothing happened … Well, nothing beyond cuddling and the obvious. Nothing that would qualify as, having done it.

  Half a piece of toast each was their breakfast.

  Turning on the rusting electric fire Helen watched three bars glow fraudulently cheerful and wondered why it had taken her so long to remember. They’d broken up a few weeks later, just before exams. It was her choice. Looking back, she could remember the toast, Tom’s Stone Roses T-shirt, the first time she’d understood the meaning of the phrase ‘companionable silence’. But she couldn’t remember why she’d ended it other than some stupid row about her being late, as usual.

  As the fire heated up, the stink of burning dust took over and more dangerous memories flooded in. All Helen could see was that poisonous orange fog and the outline of a half-naked body curled away from her. Cracking the window open half an inch, she propped a book in the gap to stop it swinging shut, and felt damp and darkness flood in. Enough speculation. She needed to get online and find out for herself before the migraine made looking at a screen impossible.

  As if sensing her urgency her second-hand Mac took minutes to crawl to life. Sliding one of her dongles into its USB slot, Helen drummed her fingers on its metal casing as she waited for it to connect. When it did, she typed VPN into Google and it offered a list of cheap providers. She clicked on the link for the first and realised cheap wasn’t good enough. Cheap required PayPal or a credit card. She needed free. Five long minutes later, she’d found one.

  After what seemed an unnecessarily fiddly process of installing, quitting open apps and double-clicking, an icon appeared on her desktop. Two more clicks and Helen was logged into the web through a VPN connection. Anyone looking – and there was no reason to assume anyone would be – wouldn’t be able to see what she was looking at. Or, more importantly, where she was looking from. That was what Art had told her anyway, when she’d asked him why he bothered to file his copy from Iraq using one, instead of just sending it direct.

  In the next fifteen minutes she had set up two anonymous mail accounts. She knew it was perverse to use her sister’s old postcode as proof of a false identity; but Fran could just add it to years of perceived misdemeanours. And probably would if she found out. To check they worked, Helen typed test 1 and test 2 into the subject boxes and pressed send. Seconds later, two emails appeared in opposite inboxes. She punched the air in pride. Smiling in recognition at the brief glimmer of the old Helen. The Helen who could do anything she put her mind to.

&nb
sp; Pulling up Google Search, Helen steeled herself and began to type.

  Apartment Fire Paris 3eme

  She hit return.

  Within seconds a page of French newsfeeds, each accompanied by a brief report, had filled the screen.

  She began to read, her progress painfully slow. Almost a year of living in Paris hadn’t given her much beyond conversational French, but Google Translate did the rest, albeit poorly. Most of the stories were more interested in the damage that had been inflicted on a seventeenth-century building of historic significance than in the no longer famous English journalist who was thought to have rented the apartment but been away at the time.

  Some words, though, it would have been impossible not to make out:

  Témoin potentiel

  Incendie

  Cadavre.

  9

  Cadavre.

  Somehow it sounded so much worse in French. Not that it sounded great in English.

  Closing her eyes against the nausea pressing in, Helen leaned back against the mangy sofa and felt years of dust cling to her sweater. The jam was still there, etched on the inside of her eyelids. The lights could not be far behind. She tried to think but her brain turned to white noise whenever she tried to remember the night itself. It wasn’t the migraine, although that wasn’t helping. Something about the fire had played havoc with her short-term memory. Nothing but an orange-hued smog and the outline of a body. The hours immediately before and after that? Nothing.

  Despite what the news reports said, what Fran said the police had told her mother, Art had been there, in the flat that night, Helen was sure of it. As sure of his presence in the flat that night as she was of her own. The question was, what the hell had she been doing there? And come to that, what the hell had he?

  Through the migraine squatting in her brain, Helen clutched at the memory of the fire … tried to hold it … dropped it. Her mind kept drifting. Slipping back in time, not just weeks but years. Why, when she could remember heads ripped off tulips as a small child and that time with Tom as clearly as if it was yesterday, couldn’t she remember a single hideous night less than a fortnight ago?