by Anna Wharton
She reaches the red sign – it’s a newsagent’s. She goes to push open the door, but it’s firmly shut. She checks the opening times. Wednesday afternoon: Closed. Who does that anymore? She pulls the cutting from her pocket, careful to hang on to it in the breeze. She studies the photograph of the Kyles, looking for some clue, a tree or a landmark, and then searches the road again. She walks on a bit further, but there’s nothing here. Along a bit, opposite the newsagent’s, is one tall red-bricked house with a nursery alongside it. Through the polythene she spots muted yellows, pinks and reds – roses probably. Otherwise, this place is grey. She walks back to the newsagent’s and stands outside, looking up and down the road. They’ve got to be here. Why would they have done an interview letting everyone know where they’d moved to if they weren’t really living here? She puts her head up to the newsagent’s window, just in case anyone is there in the back. The cold of the glass pushes against her nose. She cups her hands either side of her eyes to get a better view. Her breath fogs up the glass. She steps back, wipes it away, and then she sees it. A postcard in the window:
Lodger wanted.
Room for rent in Elm House, Low Drove. Would suit single professional. Preferably female.
There’s a phone number, but it’s the name that makes her gasp out loud.
Contact Mrs Patrick Kyle.
Maureen. She scans the road again. Elm House. So that’s where they are. It’s as if that postcard had been waiting for her. But where is Elm House? She walks again, the length of the village, all the way to the sign reading Low Drove, and then all the way back to the sign she’d seen from the bus on the way in. But there is no Elm House.
She goes back to the bus stop and looks across at the weeping willow, at its branches scraping the ground. That’s when she spots it: the lane the tree is hiding. She crosses, makes her way through the fronds of willow and a lane opens up in front of her. It’s narrow, not much wider than one car, the verges scarred with tyre tracks. And there, in the distance, on the left-hand side, a pale yellow-brick house, a short privet hedge, a blue car in the drive – Elm House.
Just a look, she reminds herself.
She walks until she’s opposite the house. She waits on the other side of the road, staring at the orange keystone above the white double-glazed front door, spreading outwards to the net curtains at the two bottom windows, slightly askew, a sign perhaps of the leftover chaos from moving. She pictures them surrounded by boxes, trying to find a perfect place for everything.
A sheet hangs at a window upstairs. They haven’t had time to find curtains to fit yet, and there, at the other bedroom window, a light shade she’s sure she recognizes. She narrows her eyes, but wind hurries the clouds along; suddenly the changing reflection of the sky in the window obscures her view. Was it a trick of the light, or a beacon welcoming her home?
TWENTY
‘Can I help you?’
Chloe jumps and turns towards the gruff voice that has broken the quiet. On the driveway stands a man. He’s about fifty-five, his hair greying, curly and wispy; broken veins stain his nose and cheeks crimson. His jumper strains against a stomach out of proportion to his otherwise slim frame. Chloe knows this man. This man is Patrick Kyle.
‘You lost?’ he says.
He watches her while she finds the words, his brow furrowing, his arms reaching across his chest.
‘I . . .’ She doesn’t know what to say, thoughts race through her head until she remembers. ‘. . . the postcard.’
He looks confused.
‘In the, er . . . in the newsagent’s window?’ Chloe says.
‘Oh that,’ he says, looking Chloe up and down. ‘Well, you’d better come in and meet my wife, this is her brilliant idea.’
He doesn’t wait for her before he turns, heading past the blue car, down the driveway towards the back of the house. Chloe stands still on the opposite side of the road. Does he want her to follow, or is he going to bring his wife – Maureen – out here? Her hands are clammy in her pockets. He turns around.
‘Well, come on then,’ he says, gesturing with his arm. ‘Unless you can see the room from the road.’
Chloe crosses the road without looking – not that she’s seen a single car since the bus dropped her off. Patrick waits for her at a small gate which leads into a large back garden. It’s laid to lawn except for stepping stones which line the route to a washing line.
‘Maureen!’ he calls. He turns around to see she’s stopped still. ‘Well, come on, girl, do you want this room?’
‘Oh . . . I,’ she starts, but before she can explain the back door flies open; a woman appears, an empty plastic washing basket under her arm. Her hair is almost all grey now, just streaked in places with the black that Chloe knows from the earlier cuttings, as if someone has come along with a fat paintbrush and missed bits. Maureen is still pretty, despite the marionette lines running down the sides of her mouth that give her a rather sad leonine face. But had Chloe ever seen her looking any other way? This is her, without a shred of doubt – this is Maureen.
‘We shall have to be getting this in Patrick, it looks like it’ll be pouring any min— oh, who’s this?’
It’s only then she sees her. Chloe is standing a few feet back from Patrick, in front of their car. Maureen reaches to fix her hair.
Patrick waves a little towards her with his right hand. ‘She’s come about that bloody advert you’ve got up in the newsagent’s.’
‘Oh Pat, will you stop moaning about that, especially when we’ve got a girl standing on our driveway who . . .’ Her voice trails off. ‘Oh, never mind.’ She dumps the washing basket in Patrick’s arms then and straightens her clothes. ‘Here, Pat, make yourself useful while I chat to . . .’
‘Chloe,’ she says, but the wind steals her voice. ‘Chloe,’ she tries again, louder. Blood is pumping at her temples. It’s really them.
‘Right, OK. Well, ignore him, Chloe. He thinks we’re fine here rattling around in this big house, but I told him there’s nothing wrong with lining our pockets with a bit of extra cash. Why don’t you come in and I’ll show you the room?’
Chloe nods, hardly able to believe that it’s been this easy, that after everything she’s read, everything she knows, she’s been invited into the Kyles’ home. Just like that.
‘Mind the step, love, it’s a bit high that one, has taken me some getting used to.’
Inside the kitchen is a black and white chequered lino. Chloe wants to tiptoe, to look and feel without disturbing this place with a single footstep. It feels like a film set, everything on show a prop: the set of knives on the wall, the dead cactus in the window, even the cobwebs that keep it company.
A terrific bang from outside makes her jump – a clap of thunder. The skies open immediately.
‘There, I knew it was going to come down any minute . . . hurry, Pat!’ she shouts out the doorway as she fills the kettle at the sink.
He shouts back something indecipherable.
‘You’ll have a cup of tea, won’t you?’ Maureen says. ‘Well, you can’t go out in this downpour now. Sit down, sit down.’
Chloe’s head is spinning. How had it been this easy? She pulls out a white wooden chair from under a small pine table. It scrapes on the floor. She sits down on it and looks around the room. The draining board is stacked with plates from lunch, two mugs, a large saucepan with a potato masher still standing up straight in it. On the fridge a magnetic diary is filled with nothing more than doctor’s appointments. In the kitchen window above the sink are four wooden letters which spell out hope. She’s reminded again of her purpose, not to allow anything to cloud why she is here. They don’t know it, of course – not yet – but she’s here to help them, to investigate Angie’s disappearance, maybe even to solve Angie’s disappearance. Maureen sees Chloe looking around.
‘Oh, don’t mind us, will you?’ she says, lifting a pile of papers from the table. ‘I was just clearing up when you arrived.’
‘It’s OK,’
Chloe says, casting her eyes further around the room. ‘Don’t feel you have to—’
‘Well, I guess you take us as you find us, especially if you’re thinking of living here.’ Maureen shrugs.
Just then Patrick comes through the back door with the washing. She rifles through a few shirts on top of the pile. ‘Oh Patrick, it’s soaked.’
‘Not much I can do when the heavens open like that,’ he says. He glances at Chloe again. He seems surprised to find her sitting at his kitchen table. It’s she who looks away.
‘Take it upstairs and put it in the box room, I’ll get the airer out later.’ She tuts as he leaves, then turns to Chloe. ‘Milk? Sugar?’
‘Yes, two, please.’
She turns her back to open a cupboard opposite. Chloe scans the contents. Everything looks ordinary enough except, just before she shuts it, she’s sure she sees a child’s cup, some cartoon character etched onto the side. Patrick returns. He pulls out the chair next to her, then has a change of heart, sitting himself down on the one opposite. Maureen puts the tea in front of her.
‘Did you make me one of tho—’
‘You didn’t say you wa—’
She sighs, opening the cupboard again to get another mug. Chloe glances for the same cup but Maureen closes it so quickly she doesn’t see a thing. Patrick picks up the newspaper and flicks straight to the horse racing. Chloe scans the room but there’s nothing to see, it’s just an ordinary kitchen. What had made her think she could come in here and find a clue to Angie’s disappearance? But the truth is, she didn’t expect to be in here at all. Maureen brings her own tea to the table and pulls out the chair between Chloe and Patrick.
‘We haven’t been here long ourselves,’ Maureen says, taking a sip. ‘Ouch, too hot.’
‘No?’ Chloe asks. ‘What brought you out here?’
She sees the way Patrick looks at her quickly from under his eyebrows.
‘Fancied a change, didn’t we, Pat?’
He changes position in his chair as if that will do as substitute for answering her.
‘We got sick of the city in the end, tired, you know. We wanted some peace. It’s nice and quiet out here, see?’
‘Yes.’
‘But what about you? Young thing like yourself, what brings you to Low Drove?’
Chloe swallows her tea and feels it scald the back of her throat. She coughs.
‘I . . . er . . .’ She hasn’t thought about this. She coughs a little more. ‘I suppose I’m after peace, too. It’s just I lived with my Nan until recently and, well . . .’ Chloe pauses, she swallows. ‘She died, quite suddenly, and . . .’
‘. . . you just needed a change,’ Maureen says.
Chloe stops and looks up at her. A connection made across the table.
‘Yes,’ Chloe says, the heat of the lie still lingering inside her throat. Unsure whether it was really necessary to bury Nan to live with the Kyles. Perhaps it was just easier.
‘Yeah, well, we know what that’s like, don’t we, Pat?’
He grunts a little, moving the racing pages of his newspaper an inch or so.
‘Oh?’ Chloe asks, but Maureen doesn’t elaborate.
‘It’s isolated out here,’ Patrick says without looking up. ‘For a young girl on her own, like. You sure you wouldn’t rather be in the city, somewhere that’s got a bit more going for it?’
Is he trying to be helpful or put her off? She looks at Maureen.
‘Oh Pat, I’m sure that Chloe is old enough to know what she—’
‘Yeah, well, I’m just sayin—’
Maureen reaches out and puts her hand on the back of his. He stops talking.
‘How old are you, Chloe?’
‘Twenty-nine,’ she replies.
Maureen swallows her tea, not blinking. She seems unsure how to answer Chloe. Instead, she gets up from the table.
‘Well, I’d best be showing you the room then.’
Patrick doesn’t follow them upstairs but Chloe feels him watch them leave the kitchen. Maureen leads her through to a hallway with parquet flooring. She glances into two rooms. The back room seems to be the main living room, and the door to the front room is pulled to, open enough only for her to spy peeling wallpaper and dusty floorboards, boxes stacked inside. When she turns back, Maureen has stopped on the first step of the stairs.
‘Like I said, we haven’t been here long so we’re still getting the place together.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Chloe replies.
Chloe follows her up a grubby runner and, at the top, on the left, there’s a window, the sill covered with dead flies. Why haven’t they cleaned them up? It seems an easy thing to do.
‘Will be nice when you get it how you want it,’ she says, filling the silence, anything to make this situation feel natural. Still pinching herself inwardly that she is here, walking up and down the insides of the Kyles’ own home.
‘Yes, it’s got a lot of potential,’ Maureen says.
There are five rooms leading off the landing, each with closed doors. Maureen points to them in turn.
‘This is the bathroom.’ She opens the door and Chloe dutifully pokes her head inside. There’s a modern suite, navy and white tiles on the wall. She nods.
‘It’s got a good shower,’ Maureen says, as if to persuade her. ‘That’s our room there at the front, next to us is a box room. That’s the spare room, and this here is the room we’re renting out.’
On the wall just outside the room, a brass crucifix clings to the anaglypta. Chloe quickly looks away.
‘Here we go,’ Maureen says, stepping inside. ‘It’s a bit stuffy.’ She swats at tiny motes of dust as she crosses the room to open a narrow window at the top of a larger one overlooking the back garden. Chloe stands in front of it, staring out at miles of unbroken flat Fenland, now soaked in rain.
‘Nice view,’ she says, searching the landscape for a glimpse of another house on the horizon and finding nothing but fields.
‘We think so,’ Maureen says. ‘When we moved, we wanted somewhere quiet.’
Chloe turns back and smiles, trying to work out how she should be behaving, what she would say if she didn’t know what she already knows. In the end, she settles for ‘Where did you move from?’ It comes out naturally, she hopes.
‘Peterborough,’ Maureen says, without elaborating.
‘Right,’ she says, feeling the sting of duplicity. She thinks of the notepad she dumped in the bin, how she wishes she still had it. She couldn’t write here, in front of Maureen, of course not. But the minute she left, before she even got back to the top of the lane, she would be writing notes for her own archive.
Maureen wanders around the room. Chloe follows her. There is a single iron bedstead in the left-hand corner, made up with a white valance sheet that reaches down to the floor and a blue and green floral duvet. Opposite there’s a wardrobe so tall it looks like it might topple over onto the mahogany-stained floorboards. And in the right-hand corner of the room, a closed door that appears to lead to an adjoining room. It is locked with a shiny silver padlock. Maureen opens the wardrobe and the hinges creak loudly.
‘Must get some of that WD40 on that,’ Maureen says to herself.
Chloe pokes her head inside, inhaling the musty smell of mothballs. She knows this smell from Nan’s house; it feels like some familiarity to hold on to.
‘It’s a bit sparse but that’s how people seem to like things these days – minimal, I think they call it.’ Maureen says. ‘But if you wanted anything else, a rug or something, I’m sure we could find you one.’
Chloe strolls around the room, hoping Maureen won’t hear her heart thudding inside her coat if she’s over by the window. She fingers the duvet for something to do, to buy herself seconds. What does she say? She hadn’t expected any of this.
‘Yes, it’s very nice,’ Chloe says. ‘Obviously I’ve got a few places to see . . .’
‘Yes, of course,’ Maureen says. ‘Perhaps it’s too quiet out here, for a young gi
rl like you.’
Chloe looks out of the window, at the miles of fields beyond, a bland lifeless landscape. She tries hard to picture the single person who would want this room. Surely it’s too isolated here for anyone, including Maureen and Patrick?
‘The only thing would be getting into town each day. I work there, you see,’ Chloe says.
Maureen nods. ‘I think there’s a bus that runs regularly, Pat might know.’
‘Yes, there is. I came on the bus today.’
She buys a few more moments in the room discussing bus timetables, ticking off on her fingers fictional times when she’d be leaving and coming home, basing it on her old office routine, of course. All the time she’s studying every detail of Maureen, the way she wrings her hands, then straightens out the pinny she’s wearing. How every so often she tucks a loose tendril of hair behind her ear, even if it’s not there. How long has she wanted to be here? No detail is lost on Chloe.
‘You might be better closer to your work?’ Maureen suggests. ‘Not that I want to put you off.’
Chloe feels the jump of panic inside, the thought of letting Maureen talk her out of the room she doesn’t even want.
‘Hmm, maybe. Has there been much interest?’
‘You’re the first,’ Maureen says. ‘The advert has been up two weeks already.’
Chloe’s mind settles again. She tries to say all the right things then; she discusses the price and appears to do a quick calculation in her head, nodding to make it seem doable. She even tests the mattress on the bed; it’s firmer than the one she has at Nan’s. She’s surprised when she makes the comparison, as if she’s playing with the idea of actually taking the room.
‘Well, it’s very nice. Can I let you know?’
‘Of course,’ Maureen says. ‘As you can see it’s available immediately, just give me a call once you’ve seen the other places.’
Chloe’s cheeks flush with heat, knowing there are no other rooms to view. She quickly turns to leave the bedroom before Maureen notices.