Four
Anna woke to darkness, disoriented and hungry. For a moment she had no idea where she was. Then the sound of the sea brought her back to Crovie, to the Fishergirl’s Luck and to herself. She got up to turn on the light, stumbling from beneath the tangle of duvet, her bare feet touching the chill of the wooden floor. She searched the edges of the unfamiliar doorframe until her fingers found the switch, then blinked blindly in the stark light until she could focus enough to read the watch still on her wrist. It was almost five o’clock in the morning.
Downstairs, the cottage was cold, but there was no wood for the burner (and besides, she hadn’t any matches). Although there was an electric heater under the staircase and another upstairs in the bedroom, Anna wasn’t yet awake enough to work out how to turn them on. She shuffled into the kitchen instead, collecting the bag of groceries she’d dumped there the night before. It was only the basics: bread, tea, milk, butter, jam, cheese, eggs, salt and pepper. Anna stared at the oven with distinct misgiving, wondering how bad it would be inside. When she finally opened the creaking door, though, she was relieved to find it nowhere near as in need of cleaning as she had expected. Anna lit the grill and pushed two slices of bread beneath it. Then she went to make tea and realized she didn’t have a kettle. Or a mug, for that matter. Water would have to do, if she could find something to put it in and the pipe wasn’t coming straight out of the sea. Toast made, Anna sank onto the sofa and ate mechanically, staring at the ceiling, feeling blank and unreal.
Anna realized that the double wooden beams above her head had been turned into storage space. In between each of the struts that held the second floor in place was a uniform five-inch gap, and in one corner there was still a book tucked into the space, lying lengthways on its cover. Anna stood and reached up to pull it out. It was an old notebook, bound in soft brown leather, and Anna opened it to discover page after page of recipes in cramped, neat handwriting. She wondered if it had belonged to the previous owner, Bren, and whether it had been left there deliberately when the MacKenzie man had cleared the place of the old woman’s belongings, or if it had just been missed. After all, her own grandmother’s recipe book was a precious thing, made even more so by the memories Anna had of the times she had spent with her mother as a young child, cooking recipes from its pages. Every time she used it now, Anna felt as if she knew a little more about her grandmother, who had passed before Anna was born. It helped her feel close to her mother, too, though she’d been gone for most of Anna’s life.
Bren’s recipe book should be a similar heirloom, and Anna made a mental note to make sure it made its way back to ‘Old Robbie’. Perhaps he had children and grandchildren who could cook from it together and in so doing remember the woman who had owned the notebook. It seemed a shame that recipes compiled so carefully should be lost. In some places there were little sketches that must have been done by Bren herself, and in others, tiny notes in an even smaller, neater hand, annotating the recipes. The notebook was a beautiful thing, and deserved to be looked after. Anna put it on the coffee table and finished her toast.
Feeling drained and fuzzy but aware there wasn’t much chance she’d sleep again, Anna decided to go for a walk. The front door would be fine on the latch for ten minutes, which was all she was going to need to traverse the length of the village and back again. Besides, the inner door had a key that she could turn and take with her.
Outside, Anna paused on the step and let the brisk wind snatch at her face and hair as she decided whether to start left or right. Left was what she chose, on the basis that it led to the end of Crovie she had yet to visit. The morning light, which in London would be a dirty, cloying grey even this early in the day, was crisp and bright, though half the village was still in the heavy shadow of the cliff. The tide had come in and was lapping high against the sea wall, tinted somewhere between azure and turquoise, its power shrouded in the quiet wash of waves. Anna took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the salted air, and struck out. She had always been an early riser, a fortunate trait in her line of work. She looked at her watch again and realized that in that other life she would have been on her way to the restaurant by now, ready to spend another long split-shift at her station, the only glimpse of the outside world the infrequent five-minute breaks snatched in the alley where they kept the bins. But she wasn’t there, and never would be again.
Anna took in the houses as she passed, surprised to realize that in a few places where the rise of the cliff was less precipitous, concrete steps staggered up between dwellings to reach additional homes built close behind. There were gardens, too, spaces where the grasses had been left to grow, creating soft slopes where the wildflowers prospered – the blue heads of harebells; the hardy white of daisies; the purple of vetch and thistle; a cheery little yellow flower for which Anna had no name. The houses altered as the far end of the village narrowed towards the encroaching cliff. Here they were smaller, mostly single-storey dwellings, or with additional windows built into the attic space. Their open faces turned towards the unforgiving ocean instead of towards each other. They were still bigger than the Fishergirl’s Luck, but not by much, and Anna tried to imagine what they must have been like inside when they were first built. Poky, cramped, cold, damp. It is amazing what people get used to, she thought. Amazing what people can survive.
No one seemed to live in any of these properties now, or at least not full-time. Most of them had signs or posters in the window, advertising them as holiday cottages to curious tourists who, like her, had wandered far enough to see them. The cliff reared up behind them, pressing in like an unsavoury stranger in a crowd. There was something else, too – an absence she could not put her finger on until she looked up and realized there were no gulls wheeling about overhead. Even the seabirds were staying away.
She caught the faint smell of dank decay. Looking up at the cliff again, Anna saw that here it was smeared with scars, old marks where the grass and earth overlying the sheer rock had shifted and slipped. Some of the houses below had obviously been affected. One had the unnaturally dark windows peculiar to abandoned dwellings. Another had curtains at its cobwebbed windows, and a blue tarpaulin was secured over its rear wall, its edges fluttering slightly in the dawn breeze. A piece of rusted guttering hung loose beneath it, torn away from its original position.
At the very end of the village, where the cliff jutted out into the bay with a curve too violent to house anything save the birds, a little open patch of grass was surrounded by a low stone wall. Three benches gave places to sit. Anna chose the one that would let her look back along the entire curve of Crovie, the village’s colours brightening as the early morning sun rose. In front of her was a pole that marked the last of the village’s communal drying lines. At the edge of the sea wall, thick wooden stakes had been cemented directly into the path, and between these were strung lines that, back in the day, would have served to dry the fisherman’s nets, or hold them while they were mended before the season began. Now the lines were clearly used for drying domestic washing when the weather was good enough, because as early as it was, some had sheets and clothes pegged to them. As Anna sat, enjoying the smell of the sea and the lap of the outgoing tide, a figure walked towards her along the path. For one terrible moment she thought it was Douglas McKean, and her heart sank. If it was, there would be no way to avoid him, and Anna did not want to start a new day with another earful from the old man. But as the figure drew closer she saw that it was a woman with white hair that drifted around her lined face like a cloud. She was clearly on a mission, putting one foot in front of the other with determined speed. When she reached the little park where Anna sat, she smiled a brief hello, but didn’t slow. Instead she stretched out one gnarled hand to grasp the washing line support and then walked around it in a tight circle, twice.
‘It’s tradition,’ the woman declared, as round she went, and then pointed at something painted on the pole. ‘See? South Pole. North Pole. Got to go around twice.’
Anna looked at the stake and realized that yes, it was painted on one side with the words ‘North Pole’ and on the other ‘South Pole’. Though Anna still didn’t know why it would be necessary to circle either twice.
By the time she turned her gaze back to the wall again, the old woman had vanished. Anna began to walk back herself at a much slower pace, soon passing out of the shadow of the cliffs. The early morning sunlight caught the colours of the flowers in hanging baskets and half barrels set beside doors and windows, their blooms flourishing despite the salt air. Behind one of the houses she saw a raised deck with a beautiful pink rose spilling over the surrounding fence.
Ahead of her, Anna heard the splutter of an engine. A motorboat was pulling away from the pier. There were two people standing in it, one of them the old woman who had circled Crovie’s north and south poles twice. At the controls was another figure, too distant to be distinct, but as the boat headed towards Gardenstown it turned, raising one hand in a wave. Anna didn’t know whether the gesture was for her, or some other, unseen recipient, but she lifted a hand and waved back anyway.
When she got back to the Fishergirl’s Luck, she found that a wicker basket had been left on the doorstep. It held a bottle of red wine, a brown paper bag holding four scones, a tin containing a candle, and a sealed envelope. Inside the envelope was a brass key, and a short note.
Dear Ms Campbell,
Welcome to Crovie and the Fishergirl’s Luck. We are so sorry that you didn’t get your key last night, and also that you arrived before we had chance to properly clean the place. Time got away from us! We had hoped to do more than just replace the mattress.
Here’s your key, and a little basket we had meant to leave as a welcoming present. Please accept it with our best wishes and the hope that you are settling in already.
Best wishes,
The MacKenzie family
‘Well then,’ said Frank Thorpe a couple of hours later, as Anna sat down at the kitchen table in the Weaver’s Nook. ‘How was your first night in the Fishergirl’s Luck?’
‘Oh,’ said Anna. ‘Fine. It was… fine.’
‘That doesn’t sound too good,’ said Pat, topping up Anna’s mug with fresh tea. ‘Did you not sleep well? The sea can take a bit of getting used to if you’re new to it.’
Anna smiled at her hostess over a plate of breakfast larger than anything she’d eaten for years. ‘It wasn’t that. I actually liked waking up to the sound of the waves. But… I realized very quickly that I’ve made a terrible mistake. I should never have bought the place.’
Pat looked at her in alarm. ‘Oh no, love, don’t say that! You’ve not been here five minutes!’
‘I know, I know. But the house needs so much work. And it’s so small! I mean, I knew it would be, but now that I’ve actually seen it… I really don’t think it’s for me.’
‘What sort of work does the place need?’ Frank asked. ‘I thought it was pretty solid. You haven’t got a roof leak, have you?’
‘No, it’s nothing like that – or at least, not that I know of,’ Anna said, tucking that new worry away to examine later. ‘But it’s very dirty, and everything is… well, old, I suppose.’
‘Ah,’ said Pat. ‘Yes, I imagine it’s pretty dusty in there by now. It had been on the market so long and no one had really shown an interest in it. Old Robbie did say he was going to come and give it the once-over before you moved in, though.’
Anna smiled. ‘He said.’
Pat looked up from her breakfast. ‘Ah! You two have met now, then?’
‘No – I went out this morning and came back to find a welcome basket on my doorstep, with a note and my key. It was a very kind gesture. And honestly, I didn’t expect to walk into a show home,’ Anna said, although even as she said this, she wondered if that was what she’d expected, without even realizing it. Everywhere she had lived with Geoff in the last fifteen years had been minimalist to the point of feeling sterile, because neither of them were ever at home long enough to create clutter and anyway, that’s what Geoff liked. Perhaps she’d forgotten what an actual lived-in home felt like. ‘It’s not even about that, really. I don’t know what I was thinking, coming here like this in the first place. It was ridiculous.’
Frank turned to Pat. ‘Remember that first day we woke up here?’
Pat chuckled against the rim of the mug she held. ‘I was thinking exactly the same thing.’
‘We thought we’d made a terrible mistake too,’ Frank said to Anna. ‘It didn’t help that a bad storm blew in the night we arrived. It was as if we’d woken into the middle of the apocalypse. Pat cried, didn’t you, love?’
‘I did,’ Pat admitted. ‘I came downstairs to the kitchen – that was before we’d redone it and put the extra WC in – to put the kettle on, and there was a draught coming under that door that made it feel as if I was descending into the Arctic. The floor was wet, too, because rain had come in through the same gap. The rug smelled like wet dog, I couldn’t get the wood burner to light, and the electricity was off. I ended up sitting on the bottom step in damp slippers, sobbing my daft heart out. I thought then that we’d wasted all our savings on a mess of trouble.’
‘I didn’t feel much better, I’ll tell you that for nothing,’ Frank added. ‘No, it took us time to fall in love with this place, and with the village too. But we did. I bet you will too, Anna, if you give it a chance.’
Anna smiled again, but privately didn’t think she’d ever be able to fall in love with the dirty old shed that was currently all she had to call home.
‘Give it a few weeks, at least,’ Pat advised, as if she’d read Anna’s mind. ‘Spend some real time in the place – make it feel like your own. It’s bound to feel strange when it’s still full of someone else’s things.’
‘Yes,’ Anna admitted. ‘That is odder than I thought it would be, it’s true.’
‘We can help with that,’ Frank told her. ‘If you’ve got stuff to move in or out, let me know – I’ll be happy to lend a hand.’
‘Thank you,’ Anna said, genuinely touched at how welcome the couple were trying to make her feel. ‘To be honest, I think the first thing I need to do is clean. Could I borrow a floorcloth, a scrubbing brush, some spray and a bucket?’
After all, she reasoned to herself as she speared another piece of bacon, whatever she was going to do with it – the vague thought of a holiday let had passed through her mind, although who would want to rent a shed with nothing but a single bed in it, she couldn’t imagine – the Fishergirl’s Luck would need a good scrub.
Five
Anna started with the kitchen, because the idea of a dirty work surface upset something fundamental in her chef’s brain. In one of the cupboards she found an old dustpan and brush, with which she swept the tiles in preparation for later mopping. Then she attacked the worktops. Anna was surprised at how well the old slabs of oak came up beneath her attention, the wood’s curving grain a natural mirror of the shape of the waves she could see through the tiny picture window over the chipped enamel of the sink. The sea was gentle today, and she wished she could hear it more clearly as she worked, but soon discovered that the window had not been designed to be opened. It was no doubt another safety feature to guard against the weather, and it made Anna wonder about the storm that Pat and Frank had mentioned. What it would be like to experience one, especially from inside the tiny confines of the Fishergirl’s Luck?
Anna had always liked storms. The first house she had lived in had an old lean-to conservatory on the back, and one of her earliest memories was of her dad waking her one night long after she’d been put to bed. There had been a storm rolling closer and he’d wanted Anna to see it. Her mum had been alive then, and when her dad had carried Anna downstairs she’d been in the kitchen, making them all hot chocolate. Her father had pulled the cushions from the old wic
ker sofa and arranged them on the floor, adding blankets to make a sort of nest so that the three of them could lie looking up at the storm crashing over their heads through the mottled glass of the conservatory roof. Even now Anna could still remember the rumbling bellow of the thunder as it drew closer, the blue-white crackle of the fork-lighting that had split the night sky above them, the taste of the thick hot chocolate, the murmur of her dad’s voice as he’d explained to her the science behind each strike, even though she’d been far too young, then, to really understand the words.
Anna paused in her scrubbing to watch the waves out of the window. Dad and Mum would have loved it here, she thought. In fact, I already know that they did, don’t I? They must have gone to so many places on that honeymoon trip, and not all of them would have ended up in that album. But Crovie did.
Was it grief that had prompted her to buy this place? Loneliness, a need to regain a connection to something fundamental and now lost to her forever? Anna supposed it must have had something to do with it. She cursed herself as an idiot again. As if a place could make up for how alone she felt in the world, take her back to a time she had felt connected, safe, wanted. How she wished she could talk to her dad about this place now.
Tell me what to do, Dad, she thought. I can’t live here, can I? I can’t. There’s nothing for me here. What was I thinking?
She went back to scrubbing so that she wouldn’t have to listen to the silence.
The oven and its tiled surround supplied its own surprise. Removing the dust revealed a splashback of beautiful dark green glaze that shone in the late morning light. Anna tried the extractor and found that, though slow to start up, it worked just fine, and that the hood itself only needed a polish to bring it back to gleaming health. Bleach did a reasonable job of returning the old Belfast sink to its former glory, although there were a few chips and cracks in the bottom that no amount of scrubbing would set right.
The House Beneath the Cliffs Page 3