by Kim Wilkins
“Even if there was any danger in Maisie meeting her grandmother, Janet, that danger has now passed. You know that.”
“But Maisie’s like her, she always has been. Being in that environment might…I don’t know…stir things up. Besides, for all we know the house could be ready to fall down around her.”
“It’s not,” Roland said. “I sent your mother’s solicitor up there. He says it’s a bit rundown, but still livable.”
“You did what? Behind my back?” Adrian recognised that tone. Janet’s frighteningly icy indignation was rare, but unnerving. It was the reason everybody avoided fighting with her.
“Now don’t lose your temper.”
“Don’t lose my…you contacted my mother’s solicitor without telling me?”
“She’s determined to go, Janet.”
“I’ve told her she can’t, so she won’t.”
“Perhaps we should get her up here so we can all discuss this rationally.”
Adrian realised now would be a good time to head back to his room. He turned and started down the stairs just as Roland rounded the corner. At precisely that moment Maisie opened the door of their bedroom.
“Hey, where’s my cup of tea?” she asked.
“I…”
“Maisie,” her father said. “Can we have a word with you?”
Janet was suddenly at Roland’s shoulder. “Adrian! You must talk some sense to her.”
Adrian stood trapped between them all on the stairs.
“What are you talking about, Mum?” Maisie asked, her black eyes narrowing.
“Adrian, please. It’s for her own good. You wouldn’t want her to be in any danger, would you?”
Roland shook his head. “Janet. There is no danger any more.”
“There is!” Janet cried, stamping her foot like a small girl. “I know my mother and I know that if Maisie goes there she’ll be in trouble.”
The top of the stairs was barred by Janet and Roland. Maisie stood at the bottom looking furious. Adrian hated conflict; he was sure it was bad for his voice. Stress created digestive problems. Digestive problems created throat problems.
“This is not about your mother,” Maisie said, spitting the words out. “This is about you. This is about you having to control everything that I do. Now I’ve left the orchestra, you can’t bear to think of me doing something that you aren’t totally in control of.”
“Maisie, that’s not true.” Janet’s eyes started with tears and Adrian glanced politely away.
“I am going. And if you don’t help me find her, then I’ll find her by myself.”
“Maisie, no. Adrian, talk to her.”
“I…”
“Don’t bring him into it, Janet,” Roland admonished.
“Nobody ever listens to me!” Janet cried. Her face was flushed and a strand of her normally smooth hair had escaped and clung to her cheek.
“Everybody always listens to you,” Maisie shot back. “Everybody always has to do what you say or you behave like this…like a child.” Maisie turned her back and marched away. The bedroom door slammed behind her.
Janet turned on Roland. “Look at all the trouble you’ve caused. Why can’t you support me on this?” She too stormed off, and another door slammed somewhere within the house. Roland and Adrian stood looking at each other.
“I’m sorry about that,” Roland said.
Adrian shrugged. “I’d better go…” He indicated towards their room.
“Yes.” Roland glanced over his shoulder, then back to Adrian. “Yes, me too.”
“It’s not true, is it? I mean, Maisie won’t be in any kind of…danger from her grandmother?” It sounded almost laughable, but he kept a straight face.
“No. Any chance of that has…passed.”
Adrian felt a surge of relief. “Thanks. Good luck with Janet.”
Roland gave a small, strained smile. “She’ll come round. She has to.”
Four days before she was due to leave, Maisie sat alone in her bedroom reading a Lonely Planet guide and highlighting bed-and-breakfast hotels in Yorkshire. Adrian was at rehearsal for a series of Christmas concerts which would take him touring around the country throughout December. She already hated letting him out of her sight, knowing only a short time remained before they then wouldn’t see each other for months. They had been apart before, but usually it was Adrian going away for master classes and tours. It felt strange to be leaving him behind for a change.
A brief knock sounded at the door and her mother came in. Maisie looked up in surprise. Janet had been icy towards her for weeks, not venturing down here once.
“Mum?”
Janet had strained lines around her mouth. She sat on the edge of the bed and ran a hand over her smooth hair. In her other hand she clutched something, so tightly her knuckles were almost white.
“Maisie, I have to say something to you.”
“What is it?”
A deep breath. “My mother and I…” She paused, turning her dark eyes downwards. Maisie realised, with embarrassment, that her mother was about to cry.
“My mother and I did not get along,” Janet continued. “We had some fundamental differences of opinion which drove us apart. And I…” A tear skidded down her pale cheek. “I regret that a very great deal.” Her words trailed off into little more than a breath.
Maisie tentatively reached out a hand, but her mother withdrew, standing and facing the small window instead. “I don’t want that to happen with us,” she said, matter-of-fact.
“It won’t,” Maisie said, not sure if it were true.
There was a long silence. Maisie watched Janet’s back. The quiet beat hard in her ears.
“Mum. You can still make it up with your mother.”
A shake of the head, but no reply.
“You could come with me,” Maisie suggested, guilty that she couldn’t imbue her voice with more sincerity. “It’s not too late. We’ll go find her together. You can…make amends.” Not apologise. Janet Fielding did not apologise.
That silence again, longer. This time Janet’s back trembled, as though she were trying to stop herself from crying.
“It is too late,” she said finally, quietly.
“No, it’s not. Come with me,” Maisie said, even though having to share her holiday with her mother filled her with sick disappointment. It wasn’t really escaping, it wasn’t really running away if her mother came with her.
Janet turned, face stony, held out her hand and dropped something on the bed. Maisie looked down. A set of keys.
“Mum?”
“The keys to her cottage. Saint Mary’s Lane, Solgreve.”
Maisie picked up the keys and looked at them in astonishment.
“And whatever you find there, whatever you find out about her…try to be sensible. Try to remember…who you are. What I’ve brought you up to be.”
“I don’t understand. Have you spoken with her? Does she know I’m coming?”
Janet shook her head. “She’s dead. She’s been dead since September.”
“Dead.” Maisie’s heart went cold. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
But Janet was already out the door, closing it firmly behind her, leaving Maisie holding the keys, cool in her palm.
CHAPTER TWO
Maisie felt as though she had been travelling forever – one long, endless night, broken only by a few glimmers of daylight through foggy windows and heavy eyelids. The unbearable, wriggling discomfort of the plane from Brisbane to Heathrow, the zombie-like hour waiting at King’s Cross Station for the train to York, cursing herself for not arranging to stay in London for a few days to recover. And then from York the connecting bus direct to Whitby, but the service which ran through Solgreve – infrequent at the best of times – wasn’t running today. By then she was so close to the end of the journey that it made a weird kind of sense to jump into a taxi and pay whatever it cost to ride the twenty-three miles to Solgreve.
So she now sat in the back of an over
heated taxi calculating that she had been travelling for nearly thirty-five hours. Apart from two blissful hours on the bus from York, when the seat next to her had been empty and she’d been able to put her head down to sleep, she had been either wide awake or in a desperate half-doze which wasn’t restful because it was so anxiously taken. She admitted to herself that she had never before fully understood what was meant by “dead tired.” What she wanted, more than anything in the world, was a soft, warm bed.
“This is the turn-off to Solgreve,” the taxi driver was saying. “Do you have any idea where you’re going from here?”
Maisie roused herself out of her jet-lagged stupor. “Yes. Yes, I have a map.” She fished in her bag for the hand-drawn map which Perry Daniels, the solicitor, had faxed her – was it only the previous day? It seemed like a lifetime ago – and gave it to the taxi driver. He pulled over and studied it.
“Right,” he said, handing back the map. “I think I know where that is. I don’t come out here much.”
“I don’t know how accurate it is,” Maisie said. “It seems a bit out of proportion.”
“No, it’s about right,” the taxi driver replied as he pulled back into the street.
Maisie looked at the map. “But the cemetery…”
“One of the biggest in Yorkshire. It’s Solgreve’s only claim to fame. That and the fact that nobody here is very friendly.”
Maisie didn’t reply.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. You have family here, don’t you?”
“Oh, no. I’m not offended. I’m just very tired.”
“This is the main street,” the taxi driver said. “The bus stop is over there, opposite the church. But the service only comes through three times a week.”
Maisie peered out the window. Even though it wasn’t quite four o’clock in the afternoon, the light was fading. On her left was a rusty sign with a picture of a bus on it. On her right was a little stone church. Behind the church were three pillars and a crumbling Gothic-style wall.
“That’s the old abbey. They built the new church on the same foundations. It’s been a sacred site for centuries.”
“I see,” said Maisie.
Something about its attenuated shadows both fascinated and unnerved her. But then, she was so tired she probably wasn’t thinking straight. Through its empty arches she glimpsed the sea.
To the north of the abbey an enormous cemetery was laid out to the cliff’s edge. On her other side were lichen-covered cottages, tiny shops, and narrow cobbled streets. She had started to feel weak and nauseous, and the closer they drew to her grandmother’s cottage, the more this seemed like the stupidest idea she had ever had in her life.
“Here we are, Saint Mary’s Lane. That must be the place you’re looking for.”
It was the only cottage on the lane. Overgrown lots lay empty beside it, and the road petered off to a dirt track leading to the cliffs beyond it. Between the house and the cliffs, trees grew wild for half a kilometre. The cottage itself was grey stone, a squat single storey with painted white sills, bars on the windows and a roof of motley tiles. It looked very old and very cold, and the low stone fence barely seemed able to defend it from the tangled wood which seemed to surround it, and the vast moors stretching out behind.
As the taxi pulled up, she felt in the side pocket of her bag for the keys, and clutched them in a trembling hand. The taxi driver was already out getting her suitcases from the boot. She climbed from the car on shaky legs and handed him the fare. The air was crisp and she shivered in her long-sleeved shirt. The smell of the sea was almost sharp in her nostrils, and she could hear it beating in the distance, late afternoon gulls calling to each other above.
“You know,” said the driver looking up at the front of the house, “I think I’ve been here before. I remember dropping off a real posh lady with lots of gold jewellery. Would have been about a year ago.”
“It might have been my grandmother,” Maisie said.
“No offence, love, but she wasn’t old enough to be anybody’s grandmother.” He turned back to her. “Good luck.”
“Thank you,” she replied, feeling fairly sure that she would be calling him tomorrow to take her all the way back to somewhere warm and modern.
She walked up the front path, weighed down by suitcases, and paused at the front door. With surprise, she noticed that the garden around the house was immaculate. Her grandmother had been dead for nearly three months, but the grass wasn’t overgrown and the flower beds were weed-free. Surely the solicitor hadn’t been out here gardening?
Despite her shaking hand, she managed to get the keys into one, two, three locks – clearly, her grandmother had been security conscious – and she opened the front door. It was only marginally warmer inside. She kicked her suitcases ahead of her and closed the door, reaching around on the wall for a light switch. A dim, yellow light illuminated a grey hallway – it may have been white once – and a note on a hall table next to a coat rack. It was from Perry Daniels. She picked it up and moved further into the musty cottage.
On the left of the hallway was a small lounge room and a dim kitchen. On her right was a bedroom and beyond that a bathroom with – god forbid – no shower, just a bath. Attached to the tap was a hose with a shower nozzle on the end. Maisie’s heart sank. Showers were one of life’s great joys. Behind the bathroom was a laundry with an aged washing machine, a brand new wall-mounted dryer, and an old boiler which she turned on. It grumbled into life. The back door led out of the laundry. She didn’t open it. The grand tour could wait until tomorrow. The last room on the left was a half-size bedroom, without a bed. It was filled instead with stacks and stacks of books and papers. An old, brown wardrobe leaned violently to its left on bent chipboard legs. A desk, overflowing with papers, was crammed into a corner. Maisie backed away. Plenty of time to clean that up later.
She returned to the bedroom. A radiator was mounted on the wall under the window and she cranked it up to high. Maisie looked at Perry Daniels’s note. He explained that he had had the telephone and electricity reconnected the previous week. Hurrah for Perry Daniels. Maisie turned slowly, gazing around her. More books and papers, a large chest and, most importantly, a big, soft bed. She kicked her shoes off and lay down – only for a minute, of course. Just while she read the solicitor’s note.
She yawned enormously and ran her eyes over the letter. Milk, bread and eggs in the kitchen. Forty pounds in the box on the mantelpiece in the lounge room. Did that mean there was a fireplace? That was something to get excited about; not that she knew how to light a fire. Call me if you have any problems. Regards, Perry Daniels. Good old Perry Daniels. Her only friend in the near vicinity. She could have wept.
Instead, without making a conscious decision to do so, she dozed off.
When one of the locals dropped by that evening, she was fast asleep and dreaming about Adrian. Together they were trying to sort out reams and reams of sheet music that had become mixed up. She was trying to follow the lines of score from one page to the next but none of it was making any sense. Adrian had pulled out certain sheets and was pinning them to the wall of their bedroom, and he hammered each thumb tack in with the side of his fist. At some point she became aware that the knocking was not coming from her dream, but rather from outside it, and she woke, disoriented and dizzy in a strange bedroom.
Her grandmother’s house, that’s right. She was a million miles from home, and there had been that nightmare of travel in between. She checked her watch. Eight o’clock. And somebody was knocking at the door.
“Hang on,” she croaked, heaving herself up from the bed. The light was still on in the dirty hallway. She approached the door and at the last moment remembered the bars on her grandmother’s windows. Was it safe to open the door at night?
“Who is it?” she called, trying to sound capable and strong.
“It’s the local Reverend.”
The Reverend? She opened the door and peered out. A short, pale man with w
atery blue eyes looked back at her. His overcoat was at least four sizes too big for him. She could just see his white collar peeking out from under the layers. He gave her a friendly smile, revealing a perfect set of false teeth, slightly ill-fitting. He was seventy if he was a day.
“Good evening. I’m Reverend Linden Fowler,” he said.
“Hello,” she said, smiling back. “I wasn’t expecting visitors just yet.” The air outside was frigid, and a fresh wind played with the treetops.
“Oh, you’ve only just arrived? I am sorry. I saw the light on and just wanted to check up on the place. It’s been empty since Sybill…passed.”
Sybill. Her grandmother’s name was Sybill. Her mother had responded to all Maisie’s questions with a standard “you’ll find out soon enough.” It was Janet’s way of punishing her. Maisie took a moment to think of the name. Sybill.
“Are you a relative of Sybill’s?”
Maisie looked up. He still had that friendly, crooked-denture smile on his face, and she found herself warming to him. “I’m her granddaughter, Maisie Fielding.” She extended her hand and he took it. His skin was very soft. “Please, come in out of the cold.”
He looked past her as though he longed to be inside, but he shook his head, withdrawing his hand.
“No, I won’t, thank you all the same. I’ve probably disturbed you sufficiently already. But feel free to drop by at the parish office if you like, and of course you’re welcome to come to a service. Though I don’t suppose you’ll be staying long.”
“I don’t know how long I’ll be staying.” Had she ever really thought three months away from home in this chilly, damp place a good idea?
“One week perhaps?”
“No, longer than that. But I’m not certain how much longer.”
“I’m sure this draughty house and our modest community wouldn’t interest someone like yourself for very long. No visitors ever stay for more than a week or so.”
Maisie, dazed and addled as she was, began to understand that the Reverend was anxious to know how long she would be here. She felt sorry for the little man, trying so hard to be polite and discreet.