by Rebecca Tope
We went down again after that, Phil leading the way. Their three dogs were all waiting at the foot of the stairs, the spaniel bouncing about with a loopy grin on its face. The corgi, I noticed, also had its tail undocked. What was it with people, thinking they knew better than age-old custom? Bad enough leaving the tail on a cocker spaniel. On a corgi it looked even more ridiculous. It made me realise how long it had been since I’d lost touch with Phil. I no longer knew his dogs, or his girlfriends, or what he thought about anything.
Somehow we all managed to get downstairs and into the kitchen, which was cold and musty-smelling and rather dark. It was at the back of the house, with a small window, across which a broom had grown. Helen had been fond of that particular shrub, despite its ill-considered position. In the year since her death it had grown in all directions, reducing the light considerably.
‘Do we have to report it or something?’ Thea asked. She was subdued but fighting it, fully aware that something strange had happened that I understood better than she did. She persisted in asserting her stronger claim on Phil. ‘Presumably a crime’s been committed – someone breaking in without permission.’
Phil closed his eyes for a few seconds, leaning back against one of the worktops. ‘It isn’t a very serious crime,’ he said eventually. ‘And he isn’t going to come back while we’re here.’
I snorted. ‘You mean somebody has to get themselves murdered before you take it seriously.’
They both seemed to go very still when I said that, catching each other’s eye. I remembered the news headlines, in the summer. Something about a boy murdered down near Chalford, somebody telling me Phil had been involved.
‘Am I missing something?’ I asked them.
‘Not really,’ said Phil. ‘Just that Thea and I both hoped not to hear that word for the whole week.’
‘Well, excuse me,’ I flounced.
‘What are we going to do, then?’ Thea repeated doggedly. She had become upset, agitated. And disappointed, as if something she’d looked forward to had been snatched away.
‘I’d like to know how he got in, at least. If we can make the place more secure I’ll feel happier,’ said Phil.
‘I suppose we should,’ said Thea.
‘Let’s check the windows,’ Phil said, pushing himself away from his perch. He moved heavily, and his eyes looked small and sunken. I knew why, but his girlfriend had no idea.
It didn’t take very long to find evidence of illicit access to the house. There was a ladder lying alongside the garden fence, not hidden at all. Phil scanned the back wall of the house, and pointed to some scratch marks on the stone just below the bathroom window. He propped the ladder up, climbed to the window, and gave it a yank. It came open easily, both halves of the casement flipping outwards as if he’d cried Open, sesame! to them. There was just space for an adult to climb through and into the house.
I felt a flicker of alarm. I, after all, had been entrusted with the security of the house. Phil had even paid me a few quid to keep an eye on it. I couldn’t remember ever having inspected the bathroom window’s fastening, although I had noticed that the wood on some of the window frames was going rotten. This had not been one of them.
We went back indoors, without talking. The other two seemed very glum, sighing and looking into each other’s eyes. I thought about it from their point of view. Obviously, this had been intended as a romantic little holiday for them, at the start of their relationship. They didn’t want policemen clumping about, checking window catches and bagging up the stuff in the attic. They hardly even wanted me there.
It was plain they weren’t going to say anything about what they intended, so I waded in and said it for them. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ I started. ‘I mean, I can pretend this never happened, if that’s what you want.’
I’d stepped onto dangerous ground all right. But then Phil ought to remember that I was always doing exactly that. He tucked his chin into his neck and looked at me like a schoolmaster.
‘Oh, bugger it.’ He smacked his hand on the table, and stared at the floor. It didn’t sound like a straight answer to my question.
‘It’s me,’ said Thea. ‘I’m a jinx. I knew I was, after the last time.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
I watched her response to this. Was she going to stand for such rudeness? He hadn’t said it gently or fondly, but as if he meant it just as it sounded. The skin tightened around her mouth and eyes, but after a deep breath she nodded. ‘You’re right. Sorry.’
‘Well, I can see I’m not needed,’ I said, not wanting to witness much more of their mutual adjustments. It didn’t matter to me whether or not they got it together and settled down for the rest of their lives, but I was no marriage counsellor and I found the details embarrassing.
‘Thanks for showing us the attic, anyway,’ said Thea, as if something had been decided. ‘We can let you get on now.’
‘You’ll have to see if you can buy a new lamp,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t one upstairs, after all.’
‘We’ll just get lots more candles, I expect,’ said Thea. ‘Or we might even try and get the power reconnected on Monday. It seems a bit silly struggling to manage without it, now we’re here.’
I had my hand on the door latch when Phil seemed to wake up. ‘Wait! Mary, wait a minute.’
I can only say that I growled at him.
‘She’s called Ariadne,’ Thea said swiftly.
‘Oh, to hell with that nonsense.’ He looked at me like a grown-up tired of playing the make believe game the children had roped him in to. ‘Don’t you know anything about what’s been happening in the attic? Can’t you even guess? Wouldn’t you have seen movement, or lights, or something, through the skylight? Or heard them?’
I straightened my spine and returned his look. ‘I have changed my name to Ariadne,’ I said loudly. ‘It is now my name. I’m not asking you to like it or approve of it. Just have the basic respect to use it. And no, I have never seen or heard anybody in this house since Helen died thirteen months ago. Is that clear enough for you?’ If I’d felt a sneaking guilt about the things I wasn’t telling him, it had quickly evaporated in the heat of my anger.
He did not drop his gaze. I remembered that he spent much of his working life asking questions and weathering a wide range of hostile and intemperate replies. But I felt amply justified in the stand I’d taken. And I was more interested in Phil’s new girlfriend’s response than I was in his or my own. Most women would have been embarrassed, tried to smooth things out, even taken sides. Instead, once she’d corrected him about my name, she just backed away, turning to her wretched spaniel and ignoring me and Phil completely. She started picking at the dog’s ears, and muttering quietly to it. The big black and tan thing sidled up to her, its nails clicking on the tiled floor, and she gave it a quick rub between the ears. I didn’t think she was embarrassed at all – just happy to leave us to settle things between us, without making any sort of judgement.
‘I’ll have to go now, anyway,’ I said. ‘I’ve got somebody coming for lunch.’
I sounded ungracious in my own ears, almost resentful, and disliked it in myself. I wasn’t usually like that. It was all about Phil and his knowledge of me as a sullen teenager. Somehow that earlier me – who he had known as Mary – was still lurking somewhere, and I couldn’t keep her out of sight. And I hadn’t just been sullen; I’d been nursing a powerful passion for him, which I hoped then, and continued to hope, had been invisible to him and everybody else. In my adolescent dreams, he had kissed me and vowed undying love, and left me tingling and confused in the morning. The reality, which I sometimes had difficulty in holding on to, was that he had been friendly, amused, relaxed, even interested – but not emotionally connected. I had hung on every word he spoke to me, and repeated them again and again afterwards. I knew Phil Hollis well – or thought I did.
CHAPTER THREE
It was true that I was expecting a visitor. One of my knitters, Gaynor, was coming
for lunch. I’d made soup from my own vegetables, and a pork stew from a small part of one of Arabella’s sons, slaughtered earlier in the year. Providing food for visitors was not something I got aereated about. There was always plenty in my pantry. Everybody constantly told me that I lived like someone from the 1940s, with my meat safe and hams and egg rack and huge collection of jamjars – not to mention the racks of homemade wine, which even I couldn’t drink as fast as I could make it. I mostly shrugged them off with a laugh, pointing out how much money I saved from never going near a supermarket.
Gaynor and I had one major thing in common: we lived alone and had few calls on our weekends. Her parents were dead and mine were otherwise engaged. We did not have boyfriends or partners or children to occupy us. We were in that awkward no-man’s-land of the mid-thirties, no longer young enough to be silly, nor old enough to panic about the rest of our lives. If we’d lived in London or Liverpool, we’d undoubtedly have been totally different people. As it was, we’d squared our shoulders, settled down, and made some progress on learning what it was we did best.
She arrived at half past twelve, smiling faintly, carrying chocolates. ‘What a lovely smell!’ she said, sniffing the air.
‘Parsnip and dill,’ I told her. ‘Do you want some sloe gin?’
Gaynor only drank when she was with me. It frightened her, as did many things. It came with all kinds of associations to do with social gatherings and protocols and unpredictable emotions. But it was all right with me. She trusted me not to take any kind of advantage. She perhaps knew that I drank more than was good for me, but not the exact extent. It wasn’t that I made any attempt to hide it, with the demijohns burping away in the back of the kitchen and crowds of empty bottles all over the place. Perhaps the tubs of fermenting blackberries and sloes and apples were a kind of camouflage. They diverted attention more into the production and less into the consumption. She nodded her acceptance of the gin.
‘Did you finish the coat?’ I asked.
‘Obviously not or I’d have brought it with me. Those buttons won’t be any good. I’ll have to get some different ones.’ The straight talking surprised me, although I chose to take it as a mark of our friendship. Nobody could be as completely submissive and mousy as most people thought Gaynor was. I had seen evidence of strength buried inside her on many occasions, although it took a close acquaintance to recognise it.
I spoke carefully. ‘Really? I thought they were fine.’
She twitched, her head jerking sideways in a characteristic mannerism. ‘They’re too big, Ari. The thing’s heavy enough as it is – chunky buttons aren’t right.’
Knitted coats were, of course, risky. They could all too easily look like baggy dressing gowns. But when they worked, they were divine, as luxurious as fur, and almost as hard-wearing. We’d adapted some Kaffe Fassett ideas, reducing the width that made several of his things unwearable and playing with collars and pockets. It took Gaynor a month to knit one, and I paid her two hundred pounds. The wool was my own handspun. So far I’d sold three for three hundred each to a fabulously upmarket emporium in Broadway, which added a disgraceful mark-up of its own. I was in a hurry for the next one. October was the best month for selling warm woollen garments. People believed there might actually be some wintry weather for a change. By January, they’d realise their mistake.
Although we’d known each other for so many years, I still had to watch my step with Gaynor. I had to rein myself in, pretend to be less competent than I actually was. Even my size could intimidate her, if I stood too close. She believed herself to be a failure in the important areas of life, viewing expert knitting as hardly worthy of notice. She was doggedly insistent on her own uselessness. My impression, gained from my earliest knowledge of her, was that she’d be fine when she got to about fifty. She could settle down then into being what she truly was – a good-natured misfit, born out of her time, living a simple solitary life with her knitting.
In an effort not to overwhelm her, I had to avoid talking about books I’d read, because she didn’t read. I couldn’t talk about the evening classes I ran in Cirencester, teaching women the secrets of dyeing and spinning and felting. ‘I don’t know how you can cope with all those people asking questions, and wanting you to tell them what to do,’ she’d shuddered, when she’d come to hear about it. My stripy hair had strained things between us, drawing people’s attention as it did and making me an object of remark. She’d gulped painfully at her first sight of it, finally asking who’d done it and how long it would take to wear off.
But one thing besides knitting that I could talk about to Gaynor was the pagan group. She would never have had the courage to join it herself, but she was extremely interested in our activities and was acquainted with all the members, having met them at my house a number of times. My role in the group was as the specialist in country matters, unravelling the ancient meanings behind superficial modern rituals. I had made it my business to keep the focus on the connections between the natural world and human beings. It came, I suppose, from my farming childhood and a deep impatience with present day religion. The group did not make any attempt to conceal its existence and most local residents seemed benign towards us. Some thought us daft, others obviously liked the local colour that we contributed. They never showed the slightest concern, in any case, recognising that we were a harmless outfit, not interested in attacking or even challenging anybody’s genuinely held views. There were the usual jokes about full moons and nakedness, but not much beyond that.
‘I’ve been busy with the Samhain stuff,’ I told Gaynor. ‘There’s going to be a divination session. Do you want me to ask anything for you?’
She went rather still, looking at her gin as if into a crystal ball. ‘Well, I sort of do, as it happens,’ she said quietly. ‘Except you’ll think it’s silly.’
‘Try me.’
‘You know Oliver Grover?’
I nodded patiently at this rhetorical question. She knew I knew Oliver, although it was more accurate to say I knew Oliver’s grandmother, old Sally Grover. I knew her very well, having taken her on at much the same time as Phil’s Auntie Helen. She lived in Naunton, only a mile or two away, and in summer I would walk up there via Arabella’s coppice. I liked Sally almost as much as I’d liked Helen. She was nearly ninety, perfectly active and alert, but prone to giddy spells. Oliver had sought me out to take some of the burden off his shoulders, his mother having gone to live in Spain with a new husband. He lived in Bourton-on-the-Water, quite close by, but Sally had refused to allow him to take on tasks that she regarded as strictly woman’s work. I was glad to be asked. It felt good to have somebody else to think about, to wonder how the old girl had slept and whether she’d tried the soup I’d made for her.
‘Well,’ Gaynor told me blushingly, ‘I think he might be trying to…you know. It’s shy he is, like me, but he looks at me…you know.’ She sighed. ‘I wouldn’t mind, you see. He’s got lovely eyes. And he talks to me as if he likes me.’ She looked as if she wanted to say something else, but I doubt if my expression was very encouraging.
Gaynor had been a very late child. Her mother was forty-eight when she was born, and her father fifty-five. They were Welsh, but had come across the border when her father lost his job in the coalmines. The migration must have taken all the courage they’d possessed, and they never managed to find a comfortable place for themselves in the Cotswolds. They were like a family of Hobbits living in the wrong universe. Small, nervous people who kept themselves shut away. I met Gaynor in the sixth form, where she was taking Latin and Ancient History A-levels. She still had her Welsh intonation, and would often say ‘is it?’ at the end of her sentences. Her parents had died before she was twenty, having taught her almost nothing about how to get along in the world. It was a wicked waste of a perfectly good person, although nobody else seemed to see it that way.
‘You want me to find out whether there’s any future for you and him?’
‘Something like that.
Can you? I mean, is that something…?’
The simple old-worldliness of her plea gave me a pang. So did her allusion to Oliver Grover, a self-employed accountant in his late thirties. Without anyone making much overt reference to it, it was common knowledge that Oliver was gay. He was a classic example, only son of a single mother, quietly amusing when you got him talking, and carrying that complicated air of having a secret that made him rather prickly. Gaynor’s suspicions that he was casting amorous glances her way could only be deluded. I wondered how she could have failed to realise.
‘Where have you seen him?’ I wondered. She had made it sound as if she saw him regularly and I couldn’t think how that could happen.
‘At the bridge club, of course,’ she said with a little twitch of impatience.
I consistently forgot that Gaynor played bridge. She seldom spoke about it and it seemed so contrary to what I knew of her that it perpetually slipped out of my mind. I had similarly forgotten that Oliver belonged to the club, as well. Card games did not feature in my life at all. The whole thing struck me as a complete waste of time, something people did to while away empty hours when they could have been far more constructively engaged. My pagan soul disapproved of cards, if I stopped to think about it. The associations with gambling and deceit only deepened my disfavour.
‘He’s quite often my partner,’ she went on. ‘That’s when Leslie can’t come. Usually they’re together, of course. And I’m with Brian. But Brian’s leg’s been very bad for months now, so we’ve had to rearrange things.’
Brian was an elderly buffer who I scarcely knew. As a bridge partner for Gaynor he sounded ideal. And even less interesting than Oliver.
‘Leslie,’ I repeated. ‘Is that Leslie Giddins? From the pagan group?’
She nodded. ‘He joined at the same time as Oliver. They both turned up without partners, so we put them together. They make a great pair, actually.’