While You Sleep

by Stephanie Merritt

  Zoe thought of Mick’s hesitant warning in the car, about the locals and their legends, embellished to frighten incomers. She took another drag, the second easier than the first, and felt the nicotine buzz through her blood.

  ‘How do you know so much about the place?’ she asked.

  ‘I lived here for a while, many years ago.’ Charles paused to relight his pipe. After considerable effort and fierce puffing, he looked up at her through a cloud of smoke. ‘After I retired, I drifted back. I think I always knew I would, deep down.’ He made it sound fatalistic, the way Mick had.

  ‘You missed it?’

  ‘It called me back. Simple as that. I took a look around and it occurred to me that people here could do with a bookshop.’ He drew on his pipe again with a rueful smile. ‘Not many of them agreed, if my accounts are anything to go by.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Edward said. ‘People love the bookshop. Your profit margins would be a lot better if you weren’t always giving books away for nothing.’

  ‘Well, that’s the trouble, you see.’ Charles leaned forward, pointing the stem of his pipe at Zoe as if he were imparting a confidence. ‘Whenever someone comes in, I think, a-ha, I know just the thing he or she should read. But people have very fixed ideas about what they think they like – have you noticed? Sometimes I have to fairly insist they take it, and then I can hardly charge them. But I’m almost never wrong – Edward will tell you. Besides,’ he sucked on the pipe and sighed out a fragrant haze, ‘I hate to see books sitting alone and unloved on a shelf. I’d much rather they found a home.’

  ‘Not the smartest way to run a business,’ Edward said, with affection. Charles inclined his head.

  ‘True. But only an idiot would open a second-hand bookshop to get rich.’

  ‘Did you live here as a child?’ Zoe asked.

  Charles looked at her, his white eyebrows gently puckered, as if the question required careful deliberation.

  ‘There you are!’ The door banged against the wall and Kaye stood on the step, a pint glass of water in one hand, jabbing a finger towards Zoe in mock-admonishment. ‘Thought we’d lost you.’

  Zoe saw her take in the cigarette and felt immediately guilty, as if she were still her adolescent self and had exposed herself to the censure of the neighbours. Kaye’s look changed when her gaze fell on Charles, stretched comfortably over his bench, Horace’s chin resting on his boots.

  ‘Has he been filling your head with nonsense?’ She nodded towards him. She was trying to keep her voice light, but Zoe did not miss the underlying sharpness, the anxiety in Kaye’s eyes.

  ‘None that wasn’t there before,’ Zoe said with a smile.

  ‘He’s a great one for the stories, is our Professor,’ Kaye said, fixing him with a stern eye. ‘Keeps us all entertained round the fire when the nights draw in. Ed – Bernie wants to go in five. Give us a drag of that.’ She took Edward’s half-smoked cigarette from his hand without waiting for an invitation, throwing a guilty glance towards the upper windows of the building behind them. ‘If my girls are looking out, I’m in trouble.’

  She hauled in another lungful and leaned down to stub out the butt in a pot of sand by the door. Edward dug his hands into his jeans pockets and dipped his head towards Zoe. ‘Nice to meet you. Hopefully we’ll see you up here again, if you’re around for a while.’ The diffident angle of his glance, the not-quite-meeting of her eye, the studied nonchalance of his tone, all caught Zoe off guard; was he flirting with her?

  ‘Sure,’ she said, aiming to sound neutral. The idea seemed so unlikely that almost as soon as it had occurred she felt embarrassed by it, in case he had guessed at her presumption. He nodded, gave Charles a brief wave and disappeared back inside the pub. Kaye beamed widely and looked at the door, as if she could will her guest back inside with the force of her smile. Zoe was too foggy with tiredness to offer any resistance. She looked at the cigarette burning slowly down between her fingers as if she couldn’t remember how it had come to be there. She ground it out in the sand and turned back at the door to Charles.

  ‘I’ll look out for your shop, Mr Joseph.’ She did not quite have the nerve to call him ‘Professor’.

  ‘Please do,’ he said, reaching down to tousle the dog between its ears. ‘Horace and I are there every day, putting the world to rights with whoever drops by. We’d be delighted to see you. I promise I’ll find you an interesting read.’

  A brief twitch of alarm passed across Kaye’s face. ‘Mind you behave yourself,’ she said, pointing at him. ‘Mrs Adams is our guest.’ Once more, the jokey tone, with the undercurrent of warning. It was curious, Zoe thought; Kaye obviously liked the Professor, but she seemed keen to keep him away from her, without ever quite making it explicit. Did she fear he might tell her some local legend that would spook her so much she’d run away tomorrow and shout it all over TripAdvisor? She almost laughed, that they could think her so skittish. They had no idea; no story could be worse than the one she carried with her. Besides, she had already paid half the rent up front.

  ‘I like history,’ she said to Charles. ‘And poetry.’ Her tongue felt thick and woolly in her mouth as she spoke. She looked down at the glass in her hand and realised it was empty; she did not remember drinking it. She felt Kaye’s solid presence at her back, ushering her firmly but gently indoors.

  After the night air of the courtyard, the heat of the log fire and the press of bodies crowded in on her. The whisky churned in her empty stomach and the nicotine pulsed in her temples, dizzying her and blurring her vision. She leaned against the wall, briefly closing her eyes. Her skull seemed to squeeze tighter and she took a deep breath to quell the nausea. Though she had no interest in making friends here, she did not want to be known forever as the woman who threw up in the bar within an hour of arriving.

  ‘You all right?’ Kaye laid her metalled fingers lightly on Zoe’s shoulder.

  Zoe nodded. ‘The bathroom?’

  ‘Past the bar, on the right.’ Kaye patted her, as you might a small child.

  The bathroom was even more stifling, airless with the heat of hand-driers in a confined space. Zoe took off her flying jacket and tucked it between her knees, splashed cold water over her face and dried it with the sleeve of her shirt. She rested her forehead against the cool of the mirror and watched as her breath fogged a circle on the glass. Her reflection stared back at her with frayed outlines. Her skin looked blanched, the shadows beneath her eyes so deep they appeared bruised. She had taken her make-up off before the flight and been too tired to bother applying any more. Straight off the red-eye, Bradley to Dublin, connecting flight to Glasgow and on to a five-hour train journey to the ferry, to bring her here. When she had planned it, back home, it had seemed a good idea: get all the travelling done at once, no layovers, no breaks for sightseeing. She was not here for tourist attractions. All she wanted was to get to the sprawling old house by that deserted shore that had called to her over the Internet, and wrap its solitude around her. She had no sense of time any more; she struggled to remember when she had last eaten, or showered.

  Rubbing away the condensation of her breath with a sleeve, she met her reflection’s eye with as steady a gaze as she could manage. They both seemed disappointed with each other. Turning forty-three, and looking every last day of it. Did she seriously imagine that earnest, handsome boy would have been flirting with her? But it was more than jet lag, she thought, peering closely at her own face in the mirror; all the turbulence of the past year was written into her skin, a bone-deep exhaustion she could not shake off. Perhaps here she would finally be able to sleep.

  She fished in her pocket and found a Chanel lipstick, one she had thrown in at the last minute, just in case. In case of what? What occasions to dress up had she imagined would present themselves on a small island off the west coast of Scotland, in winter? She barely wore lipstick even at home. Perhaps it was a defensive measure, a reaction against all the military-coloured hiking gear and shapeless sweaters she had packed. One la
st vestige of femininity. She opened her lips and slicked it around them, blotting the colour on a sheet of toilet paper. Not too garish; a discreet reddish-brown that she used to think suited her but now seemed to drain all the colour from the rest of her face. She wondered how soon she could reasonably ask to leave.

  The door opened; Zoe glanced up and saw that another face was staring at her, unsmiling, in the mirror. The young barmaid, Annag, reached up and adjusted the pineapple of hair balanced on her crown, her eyes critically appraising Zoe all the while.

  ‘You’re the one who’s taken the McBride house.’ The girl’s accent was broad, rough-edged. ‘Brave,’ she added, cocking one thinly pencilled brow with an air of challenge.

  ‘It’s Mick and Kaye’s house, I thought,’ Zoe said mildly. ‘Aren’t they Drummonds?’ She did not ask why she should be considered brave, precisely because she could see that the girl was dying to tell her.

  ‘It’ll always be the McBride house round here,’ Annag said, with a meaningful look. She had an oddly flat face, Zoe thought, and wide, with all the features cramped together in the middle, like a puppet of the moon she had once seen in a kids’ show. Too pale for that unnatural shade of black dye, she added, in her head. This girl’s attitude seemed to provoke a mean streak in her, as if they were both in high school.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t pronounce its real name,’ she said, forcing a smile.

  Annag muttered a word deep in her throat that Zoe assumed was Gaelic, but sounded nothing like the way it looked on paper. ‘It means “resting place”,’ she said.

  ‘Oh. That’s nice.’

  ‘You think?’

  Zoe looked up and saw that the girl was smirking openly. A strange chill ran through her as she understood. Clearly, the person who named the house had not stopped to consider its double meaning. Or perhaps they had.

  ‘Give us a lend of your lippy.’ A pudgy hand stretched out towards her, open; bitten fingernails painted flaking green. Zoe hesitated. Was this a normal thing to ask a stranger? She had grown up without sisters, without a close group of girlfriends; as a result she was possessive about her belongings and a little fastidious, bewildered by the kind of women who presumed all feminine items should be held in common. But she couldn’t think of a good reason to refuse without implying that she considered the girl unhygienic. Reluctantly, she passed the lipstick over. Annag stretched her mouth wide, drew on a red circle, smacked her lips together and pouted, apparently pleased with the result.

  ‘Why am I brave, then?’ Zoe asked, as if this small intimacy might now entitle her to answers. ‘I guess it’s haunted or something, right?’ She tried to make it sound jokey, as if she were happy to play along, but a look of guilt slunk over Annag’s moon face. The girl concentrated on the lipstick, twisting it all the way to the top and down again.

  ‘I only meant – staying out there on your own. In the middle of nowhere. That’s brave, for a woman.’ She reached inside her top with one hand and twanged a stray bra strap into place. ‘Not that I’m saying— I don’t mean …’ She turned to look at the real Zoe beside her, instead of at her reflection. ‘Whatever folk say about it, you didnae hear it from me, okay? Mick’ll bloody kill me.’

  So Mick had warned this girl about telling whatever tales clung to the house. Had everyone else in the town been given a warning too? Charles Joseph apparently had, though he didn’t seem to feel inhibited by it. What could be so terrible that Kaye and Mick genuinely feared it might drive a tenant away? It will be one of those stories like the ones people used to swap at high school slumber parties, Zoe thought: like the one where the girl hears the banging on the car roof and it turns out to be her boyfriend’s head. And that’s what you get for coming to the ass-end of nowhere, she reminded herself: people who take that stuff seriously. But she found that, however dumb the story might be, she didn’t want to hear it on her first night.

  ‘But I haven’t heard anything,’ she said.

  ‘Then you’ll sleep soundly in your bed, won’t you?’ Annag flashed her a smile that seemed to contain some element of private triumph, before walking out. As the door banged behind her, Zoe realised Annag still had her lipstick in her hand. She considered going after her, asking for it back, but decided against it. There was no point making an enemy of this girl, who already seemed to resent her presence. But if she was honest, it was because Annag reminded her of the hard-faced girls who had given her hell in high school, and she despised herself for her own cowardice. She made a note to stay out of the barmaid’s way as far as possible. Out of everyone’s way. She caught her reflection’s eye with weary contempt, and slowly wiped away the bright slash of lipstick with a tissue.

  Even in the dark, the house looked imposing. Mick had installed motion-sensor security lights at the front; a white glare leapt out of the blackness like a prison searchlight as the Land Rover descended the last slope and rounded the curve of the drive, Mick raising a hand to shield his eyes and swearing under his breath. They lit up a rambling house of three storeys, tall Gothic windows along the first floor, diamond-paned glass, pointed eaves over the windows in the attic, several tall chimneys and a hexagonal turret jutting up from the roof. A warm light glowed from one of the windows on the ground floor. As Zoe swung herself down on to the gravel, she could hear the booming of waves in the darkness beyond the house.

  ‘Kaye’s left you a few bits and bobs – bread and milk and whatnot,’ Mick said, lifting her suitcase down from the trunk. ‘Should see you right for breakfast. She’s done a wee folder too, telling you where to find everything – it’s got our number on and a few others you might need. I was thinking I could come by tomorrow before lunch and show you the other stuff. How the generator works, where we store the logs, all that business. Then, if you like, I’ll bring you into town so you can go to the supermarket.’

  Zoe murmured her thanks, only half listening. She craned her neck and stared up at the night sky. A brisk wind chivvied scraps of cloud across the face of the moon; behind them, an extravagant scattering of stars glittered across ink blue wastes. The seabirds sounded subdued here, their cries reproachful. ‘Why do people call it the McBride house?’

  Mick froze, for a heartbeat, in the act of setting down her art case. ‘McBride was the fella who built it, back in 1860.’ He sounded unusually stiff.

  ‘Was he a relative?’

  ‘He married my great-great-aunt. It passed to her brother, my great-great-grandfather. Been in my family ever since. But the name stuck. Now,’ he said, forcibly cheery, ‘let’s get this lot inside and you can settle in.’

  He carried her cases into the wide entrance hall, set them down at the foot of the stairs and immediately flicked on all the lights he could find. Inside, the house smelled of new paint, furniture polish and the heavy floral scent from an extravagant vase of lilies that stood on a wooden chest opposite the front door.

  ‘Beautiful flowers,’ Zoe remarked, to fill the silence.

  ‘Oh, aye. Kaye did those.’ Mick seemed distracted, his eyes flitting around the hallway as if he half expected to see someone appear from one of the doors leading off it.

  ‘That was such a kind thought – will you thank her?’ It was gone eleven, by the grandfather clock in the hall; Zoe had lost all track of what time her own body thought it was, but the whisky sat heavy in her stomach and she was struggling to keep her eyes open. She wished he would hurry up and leave.

  ‘I will. Well, then. There are your keys. Those are the front door. The ones for the back are on a hook in the kitchen.’ Mick dropped a weighty keyring into her palm, dug his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, then took them out again as if unsure what to do with them, glancing back at the front door. He seemed reluctant to go, but at a loss as to how to prolong his visit. For one awful moment, Zoe wondered if he was hovering for a tip, but it didn’t seem likely. ‘Shall I take these up for you?’ he asked, his gaze alighting on the cases.

  ‘Oh, no, I can manage,’ she began, but he
was halfway up the stairs, telling her it was no trouble.

  ‘Well, then,’ he said, when he returned. ‘I suppose I should let you get on. The water from the tap’s fine to drink, by the way. And you remember there’s no broadband? I mentioned that in the email.’

  ‘It’s fine. It’ll be good for me to get offline.’ She forced a smile.

  ‘They haven’t got the cables out to this side of the island,’ Mick explained, keen to make clear it was no failing on his part. ‘In the next year or so, they reckon, not that that’s much help to you. You can come and use ours up at the pub if you want to send emails and whatnot.’ He hesitated once more, running a hand over his thinning hair. ‘Like I said, our number’s there in the folder. Call us if you need anything, anytime. We’re only five miles away, I can be here in a jiffy if there’s a problem.’

  ‘I’ll try not to disturb you if I can possibly help it. I’m pretty self-sufficient.’ She was not sure if this was actually true. It was a long time since she had put it to the test, but it was important that Mick should believe it. All she wanted now was to find the bed and fall face down on it.

  ‘Aye, well, that’s good. But we’re here if you need us. I mean it – anytime at all. Day or night.’ He said it more emphatically this time, and his gaze darted away to the top of the stairs. At the front door he turned back, holding it half open so that moths hurled themselves towards the light, wings whirring. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow at noon. I hope you have a comfortable night.’

  ‘I’m sure I will.’ She almost had to push him physically out of the door. She stood on the threshold, a narrow fan of light spilling through on to the step in front of her, determinedly waving him off so she could be sure he was finally gone. He raised his hand as he reversed the Land Rover with a scattering of gravel, but in the white cone of the security light his expression was anxious, just as it had been in the hallway.