While You Sleep

by Stephanie Merritt

  She darted a furtive glance towards the kitchen, where Edward was pouring hissing water into a teapot. Who was L? Nothing about this sparse cottage suggested the existence of a girlfriend. Where was L now, she wondered. What had happened to all the summers to come?

  He came in bearing the mugs before him like votive offerings, steam fogging up his glasses. Zoe quickly thrust the book back on the pile, but if he noticed, he said nothing. He set one of the mugs down on another stack of books beside the sofa and gestured for Zoe to sit, then flopped on the opposite end, pressed up against the armrest – there were no other chairs in the room – and tucked one leg under him like a child, both hands wrapped around his mug while he watched her over the rim.

  ‘Look, Charles is really the person to ask about this,’ he began, half-apologetic, half-defensive. ‘I only know what he’s told me, and the general gossip.’

  Zoe smiled encouragement. ‘Tell me the gossip, then. Ailsa McBride killed her kid, is that it?’

  He sighed and looked down into his tea, as if he might find a prompt sheet there. ‘Supposedly she went mad, or she was possessed, or something along those lines. She’s meant to have killed her son and then herself. But they never found the boy.’

  ‘Then how do they know she killed him?’

  ‘They found some of his clothes washed up on the rocks.’ He bit his lip. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this.’

  ‘Screw Mick,’ Zoe said, feeling bolder.

  ‘It’s not about Mick. I was thinking of you having to go back there on your own.’

  ‘Couldn’t they both have been murdered?’

  Edward tilted his head, considering. ‘I’ve never heard that as a theory, I don’t know why.’

  ‘Because the whole island had it in for Ailsa, clearly. A woman of independent means, raising her child with no need of a man? Must be crazy. They both get killed – the crazy witch lady must have done it. Case closed.’

  ‘It is a bit Wicker Man, isn’t it?’ Edward caught her eye and they both grinned; in that instant, Zoe felt the unexpected click of connection and knew, with a pang of relief, that she was no longer alone here. She had an ally.

  ‘What happened to Ailsa?’ she asked, when she realised they had been holding one another’s gaze a beat too long to be comfortable.

  ‘Her body washed up further round the coast a few days later, fully clothed, no wounds on her. So they concluded she’d drowned herself after killing the boy.’

  ‘But if the kid was never found, they can’t even be certain he was killed, surely? Maybe he ran away.’

  Edward shrugged. ‘I suppose. But he’d have turned up sooner or later, wouldn’t he, on a small island? People seem to have accepted the Ailsa version as fact, though. There’s a lot of whispering about how the land is bad in that corner of the island.’

  ‘Bad how?’

  ‘Cursed. McBride apparently tore down the remains of a ruined chapel and used the stones to build over its foundations, and the chapel had been built on an ancient pagan site to sanctify it, so he was asking for trouble.’ He grinned and shifted position, stretched out the leg that had been folded and tucked the other under.

  ‘Great. So I’m staying in a house with an ancient curse, haunted by a child-killing witch.’

  Edward laughed. ‘Yup. Enjoy your holiday.’

  Zoe leaned her head back against the sofa cushion and laughed along. Rain gusted against the window panes like gravel flung with malice, and the wind boomed down the chimney, shaking the doorframe. The room had grown darker around them as the last light leached from the sky; shadows stole out from the corners, settling over the hollows and angles of their faces. Edward reached behind him and clicked the switch on a standing lamp, warming their corner of the room with a soft amber glow. A silence unfolded, unhurried and companionable. She held the mug to her lips, breathing in its warmth, and found she had no desire to leave. For a while, she could almost forget herself.

  ‘I don’t know why Mick wants to keep all this hushed up,’ she remarked eventually. ‘Plenty of people would pay a fortune to stay in a place with that kind of history.’

  ‘Exactly – ghouls. Unsolved-murder fetishists. Those weirdos who think you can measure paranormal activity with radio waves.’ He picked at a loose thread on the cushion cover. ‘There was a lot of resentment in the village when he inherited the house and started to do it up. There’d been a kind of unspoken agreement between the Drummonds and the islanders that the McBride house would be left to fall into ruin and the story allowed to die with it.’ He arched his back and folded his hands together behind his head. As he moved, his knee brushed briefly against Zoe’s leg and she felt a small shock jolt through her like static. ‘It’s seen as a taint on the island’s reputation – they take all that Gothic stuff quite seriously and they don’t want to be famous for it. It took Mick a long time to persuade the locals that he wouldn’t use the family history as a selling point.’

  Outside, a gull’s mournful cry echoed across the empty schoolyard like a reprimand.

  ‘So everyone is sworn to secrecy,’ Zoe said, sitting up and wrapping her hands around her mug. ‘Did Mick tell you all this?’

  Edward shook his head. ‘He doesn’t like to talk about it. This all happened before I got here. Charles told me most of it – and Annag Logan, the barmaid at the Stag.’

  Zoe thought of her lipstick with a stab of resentment. ‘Are you and she …?’ She made a vague motion with her hand that implied conjunction.

  Edward’s look of confusion shaded to outrage as he understood her meaning. ‘Christ, no. Would you seriously think …?’ He straightened up, pushing a hand through his hair. ‘Not exactly my type. Apart from anything else, she’s only sixteen.’

  ‘Is she really?’ Zoe nodded in mild surprise. ‘I’d have said older. I didn’t mean to offend,’ she added quickly. ‘Only – there can’t be many young women out here.’

  ‘I didn’t really come here to meet women.’ A corner of his mouth twisted; there was a darker note in his voice which piqued her interest. ‘Quite the opposite, in fact.’

  ‘You came here to meet men?’

  It took him a moment to spot the glint in her eye; he threw a cushion at her, laughing as she tried to duck. ‘That’s right – big fishermen and rig workers. I love an oilskin, me.’

  ‘And how’s that working out for you?’

  He made a face. ‘I’m sick of the smell of herring, truth be told. And they’re away so much. I’m a herring widow.’

  Zoe laughed and chucked the cushion back; he jerked his mug out of the firing line, too late, as tea sloshed over the upholstery. ‘Hey, watch the sofa! It’s a priceless heirloom.’

  ‘It’s definitely historic.’ Zoe rubbed the cheap brown fabric with a finger where the arms were worn shiny with use. Wind snarled down the chimney and worried the window frames; she thought she caught the bass note of distant thunder.

  ‘Should I light a fire?’ Edward glanced at her for approval; when she shrugged, to say she didn’t mind either way, he sprang to his feet and knelt in front of the hearth. ‘I usually sweep it out and leave it ready in the mornings, now the nights are getting colder,’ he remarked, over his shoulder, as he reached for logs from a basket to one side.

  It was the sort of thing her grandmother might have said. Zoe watched his careful, methodical movements and found it suddenly unbearably touching – the thought of him waking here alone, dutifully sweeping out the night’s cold ashes before the children piled shrieking into school, laying his little fire for the long dark evening with his music and his poetry. She wondered how he could stand it, the loneliness. The room seemed shrunken in the half-light, the walls and ceiling pressing in. The McBride house was lonely too, but at least there was a grandeur to its solitude; its proud aspect, facing out to the open sea, lent an aloofness to the isolation. This cottage was merely dingy and sad; it smelled faintly of damp and spinsterhood. She watched Edward as he leaned forward, tucking old newspaper around the
kindling. The movement caused his shirt to ride up, revealing a hand’s breadth of bare skin above the waistband of his underwear, dusted with blond hairs; fine, taut muscles either side of his spine, not a spare inch of flesh. Zoe felt a stirring deep between her legs, a vestige of that restless energy that had not quite dissipated after the night’s unruly dreams. A hot, strong throb of desire pulsed through her; for the space of a blink, she thought she recalled the elusive face of her dream lover, but when she tried to focus it had dissolved into shadow. She squeezed her thighs together and clutched the mug tighter.

  ‘Why did you come here?’ she asked him, fighting to keep her voice level. She pressed one hand to her cheek and felt it blazing.

  He rocked back on his heels and turned to look at her, a box of matches poised in his hand, his face frank and open and impossibly young. ‘I broke up with someone. I was planning to stay in Oxford for another couple of years while she finished her PhD, but … well. She met someone else. That’s what happened.’ He dropped his gaze to the matchbox, turning it between his fingers. ‘So I wanted to get as far away as I could. I saw this job advertised. I didn’t think they’d take me – I’d only just graduated. But it was halfway through the year and I guess they weren’t overwhelmed with applicants. A place like this isn’t for everyone, I suppose.’

  ‘Is it for you?’

  He paused.

  ‘It’ll do, for now. I wouldn’t want to settle.’ He stared into the fireplace, letting out a long sigh and covering it with the hiss and flare of a match sparking. The room fell silent; only the crack and spit of the fire as he coaxed it to life. A dark scent of woodsmoke drifted up from the hearth. When he was satisfied, he sat back, cross-legged, and turned his gaze on her. ‘How about you?’

  ‘What about me?’ It came out sharp-edged; she had not meant to sound so defensive. He blinked, his expression mild behind his glasses.

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  She hesitated, watching him. How much should she say? Could she tell him everything that had happened with Dan this past year; could she unspool the brittle thread of events that had led her to this place? How much of that could he hope to understand, this dark-eyed, earnest boy, whose first serious break-up had sent him fleeing to the other end of the country? The urge to unburden herself rose up through her, fierce and strong; she caught her breath and pulled back from the edge in time.

  ‘I wanted some quiet.’ She ran a finger around the rim of her mug. ‘A place to paint.’

  ‘Long way to come for it.’ Edward hugged his knees. His tone offered no judgement, though it was half a question. Zoe made a small movement with her shoulders to acknowledge the truth of this. ‘So, do you have a partner?’ he asked, in the same light tone, when it became clear that she was giving nothing without a prompt.

  Firelight sparked in bright reflections from his glasses; behind them, she could not see his eyes clearly. She left a long pause, not because she wanted to guard her privacy, but because she was no longer even sure of the answer herself.

  ‘I did,’ she murmured, after a while. Her eyes flicked away to the lurching shadows thrown by the flames. Edward nodded, as if he understood. When he didn’t say any more, she let her shoulders unclench and thanked him silently for having the grace not to force it.

  ‘The Professor was right, then,’ he said, as he levered himself to his feet and brushed down his trousers. ‘We are all running away.’

  Zoe looked up at him briefly with a closed little smile. She wrapped her arms around her chest and drew her knees up, turning back to the fire. Edward bent to pick up her mug.

  ‘Do you want more tea? Or …’ His eyes darted away from hers and he dipped his chin. ‘I have a bottle of wine somewhere, if you’d rather?’

  He was looking at her from under his lashes, shoulders hunched, his torso twisting with awkwardness. Zoe shifted, wincing as the sofa’s defeated springs dug into her leg. Again she felt wrong-footed by the difficulty of recognising his motives. If a man her age had offered the same, she might have presumed he was making a move, but she had no way of knowing how Edward regarded her. Perhaps he was being friendly to a stranger because he had been raised well; perhaps he simply wanted someone to talk to, and would be appalled to think she might have taken it any other way – a woman nearer his mother’s age than his. She glanced away to the window; the sky had turned the colour of wet slate and rain drove at the panes with determination. There was no way she could ride the bike back now, whether she had a drink or not. Part of her wanted nothing more than to stay, to feel that first thick heat of the alcohol sliding through her, gently teasing out the snarls and tangles of her mind; to sit here and listen to this beautiful boy, so pristine in all the blithe self-assurance and anxious uncertainty of youth. She would have liked to pretend, for one night, that she was his age again; to drink wine, play music, sit on the floor into the small hours until he suggested that she stay over. Just for the company, the warmth of another body, the knowledge that she was still desirable. She closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose between her finger and thumb. This was exactly the kind of situation she had resolved to avoid. If she relaxed now, she would find herself talking. It would all come out: everything she had worked so hard to tamp down, out of sight. A patient listener would undo her. And she could tell he would listen well; there was a stillness about him, an attentiveness to others rare in a boy his age. The children must adore him, she thought. Caleb would. She swiped that thought away before it could settle. Besides, she had begun to feel a strange compulsion to return to the house, a chafe of anxiety behind her sternum, as if it were calling her back.

  ‘You won’t be cycling out there now, in any case,’ he said, nodding to the window as if he had heard her thoughts. ‘I can drop you home later if you like, though you’d have to leave the bike here. If I only have one glass.’

  ‘No!’ The word cracked out of her, hard and fast as a shot, ricocheting off the walls. Edward stared at her, alarmed. She breathed in and out, tightened her hand around the arm of the sofa. She was shocked at herself; she had not meant to sound so fierce.

  ‘I meant – you shouldn’t drink at all, if you’re going to drive,’ she said, not looking at him, shaping each word clearly and precisely so as to keep her voice steady, though she could feel the colour rising up her neck. ‘You never know—’ She broke off, aware that she sounded like a parent. Well, let him think that.

  Edward shuffled, chastened.

  ‘No, you’re right. I wouldn’t usually, but you don’t get pulled over here. More tea, then?’ When she hesitated, he said, as bait, ‘I haven’t told you yet what happened last year.’

  Her scalp tightened. She was no longer sure she wanted to hear any more of these stories. Charles was right; they would take on a different shape once she was back in the house, alone, with the darkness pressing in. Whatever Edward was about to tell her, she could not unknow. But she merely nodded, watching him as he padded softly in his socks back to the kitchen to fill the kettle.

  ‘A child disappeared at the McBride house,’ he announced when he returned, holding out her mug. He settled himself on the floor near the fire with his back against the sofa. His head was close enough to her knees for Zoe to reach out and stroke his hair. She wondered briefly how he would react if she did, and clamped her free hand firmly under her thigh, because she did not entirely trust herself.

  ‘Disappeared?’ Her voice sounded high and strange. ‘How?’

  ‘They don’t really know.’ He stretched his legs out and crossed his feet at the ankles. ‘It was last August, just over a year ago. Mick was a few months into the work and the place was a building site, but the business had stirred up a lot of talk in the town, about the house’s history. Two of the village boys picked up on it and dared each other to spend a night out there, ghost-hunting, for a laugh. One of them didn’t come back.’

  The fine hairs prickled along her arm. ‘Jesus. What happened?’

  ‘The boy who survive
d, Robbie Logan – that’s Annag’s brother – thought his friend saw something in the ruined house. They’d hidden on the beach at first, but Robbie said when he got there, he lost his nerve and refused to go in. He stayed down by the rocks. Iain Finlay, the other boy, went alone.’ He paused to sip his tea, snatching glances at her from the tail of his eye. ‘Robbie says he heard Iain scream, and saw him running away, up on to the cliffs, but he couldn’t be sure because it was dark and he was terrified, so he hunkered down out of sight.’

  Zoe let out a soft whistle. ‘Did he fall, then – Iain?’

  ‘So they reckon. If he ran up on to the headland, away from the house, he could have missed his footing in the dark and gone over the cliff. It’s a sixty-foot drop there and the water covers the rocks at the foot when the tide’s high. By the time the police were called, it had already been in and out. They concluded the body must have been washed away without a trace.’

  ‘And the other boy, Robbie – he really saw nothing?’

  Edward shook his head. ‘Apparently not. Although …’ he hesitated, rubbing his thumb along his chin, ‘there was a lot of talk about that, too. How much Robbie knew.’

  ‘Shit. I’ll bet.’

  ‘The police had trouble getting anything out of him. There was a social worker assigned to the family – she told me all this when I started at the school. Robbie didn’t go home till the next morning – he’d been wandering all night, out on the moorland, he said. He hardly spoke, except to give them that version. The social worker seemed to think he’d been traumatised, but …’ He held out his hands, empty.

  ‘Not everyone believed it, huh?’

  ‘He was only ten at the time, but he’s a big lad and he had a reputation as a bully. The younger kids are scared of him, though he mostly keeps to himself now. I think people didn’t buy the idea of him cowering down on the beach. Iain was always the weaker character, they said – he did what Robbie told him.’