by Diane Janes
Jo didn’t want to get into a discussion about second homes and vanished communities. It was one of Maisie’s pet topics, although Jo was not entirely sure what kind of community Maisie imagined had ever existed at Easter Bridge. It had never been large enough to call itself a village. There had never been a school or a shop here – if anything, the small settlement had expanded in recent times thanks to an enterprising local farmer selling off building plots before the inception of stricter regulations imposed by the National Park Authority. Fortunately, Maisie showed no inclination to mount her soap box and Jo managed to escape after a brief exchange about the weather, crossing the opening where the track led up to High Gilpin, then heading steadily up the hill.
The next two buildings on Maisie’s side of the road were extremely incongruous in the context of a Cumbrian hamlet. The first of them, Ingledene, was a double-fronted Victorian house, complete with bay windows and streaky-bacon brickwork, which would not have looked out of place in a London suburb. It had been built to house a minister for the matching chapel next door, both structures dating back to the last decade of the nineteenth century, when the farmer at High Gilpin, having found religion in a big way, financed the erection of both buildings in the expectation of a New Jerusalem arising in the valley.
Folk history had it that the family from High Gilpin and their minister held services in splendid isolation, with even their immediate neighbours declining to join them in the new oak pews. After a short life as an active place of worship the chapel had enjoyed a chequered history, eventually becoming an art gallery, which was currently run by Brian and Shelley, who lived in bohemian disorder at Ingledene.
Jo got on well with Shelley, and quite often dropped into the gallery for a chat when she thought Brian was not around. Something about Brian had always unnerved her. He was a well-known local artist whose work commanded four-figure sums, a great bear of a man, known for his intensely held opinions and very short fuse. It was rumoured that he once took such violent exception to the views expressed by an art critic at a Royal Academy Summer Exhibition that he punched the man in the jaw and was prosecuted for common assault. Another reason for her eschewing the local art classes was that Brian sometimes taught them. Shelley was an artist too, but she was far less commercially successful – or volatile – than Brian.
The gallery was still in darkness as Jo passed. Shelley and Brian did not generally open for business until about eleven. There was not much passing trade – they relied on people who were serious about art, Shelley had once explained; people who came out of their way specially, because the gallery had a high reputation and only hung work which represented the very best of local artists.
Local artists … It suddenly occurred to Jo that it might be possible to build a tour around artists associated with Cumbria. She did not know much about famous local painters, apart from Ruskin and Collingwood, who featured in their existing literary tours, but maybe this was something she could talk to Shelley about – not Brian, who she thought sure to be contemptuous and dismissive of the whole idea.
A few yards beyond the gallery she reached the last dwelling in Easter Bridge, The Hollies, a barn conversion now the country retreat of Harry’s family. She knew that they had returned south on Saturday, and guessed that the place would probably sit empty for several weeks now. Maisie Perry was wont to cluck about this, but Jo tended to be more realistic: it was not merely house prices which put a house like The Hollies beyond the reach of a family on a modest income. There was no work nearby, no shops, no local school, no viable public transport – unless you counted the twice-daily school bus. Ordinary life in a place like this was too expensive for any family on a low income. Living out here required at the minimum a well-maintained car for every working adult in the household. Food shopping had to be carefully thought through and involved a round trip of almost twenty miles – with cheaper supermarkets all but double the distance. Television reception was only available to those who could afford a satellite dish. In Jo’s opinion, the so-called scourge of second homes and holiday cottages was often what prevented tiny hamlets like this from falling into the semi-dereliction of rural poverty.
A hundred yards or so past The Hollies, she negotiated the squeeze style at the side of the lane and began to climb a steep footpath through the trees. Apart from a nearby robin, it was exceptionally quiet; no cars passing along the lane, no voices floating up from the gardens. There was a timelessness up here: it might have been tomorrow already, or a hundred years ago. It was very damp among the trees. Mosses and lichens were misted with winter moisture. In places water oozed up from beneath the carpet of fallen leaves, forming puddles around the soles of her boots, deep enough to flick muddy water on to her thick woollen socks when she lifted her feet.
It was a fairly stiff climb at the beginning, and after a few minutes of steady walking, the path turned rocky, becoming a stream in places, with a hundred miniature waterfalls each singing their own distinctive tune. When the path eventually emerged on to the open moor, the change was abrupt, the contrast almost startling after the close intimacy of the trees. From here Jo headed north-west, until the Coniston range loomed into view, impossibly large, making you wonder how it could have hidden itself behind a small ridge for so long.
When she reached a group of large flat stones, an imperfect circle which looked as if it had been set out there on purpose for a meeting, she dragged her mat out of the rucksack, sat down and prepared herself to draw, securing the sides of her sketch book with bulldog clips to prevent the light breeze from interfering with her endeavours.
You could lose yourself in drawing. That was one of the great things about it: if you really focused on what you were doing, there was no room to think about anything else. And whenever Jo attempted to capture the landscape on paper, she always saw things that she had never noticed before – a tiny thread of water marking its course downhill; the shadows which darkened the side of Brown Pike. It was a different way of looking – a new way of seeing.
This total concentration did not always work entirely to her advantage. Left to their own devices some of her thoughts – a subversive group which operated to an agenda of their own – had a nasty habit of bursting to the forefront of her mind when she was least expecting them. Thus, after she had been working steadily for a time, she abruptly became aware of Sean’s voice in her head, repeating the question he had put to her on Saturday night: ‘Are you saying I’m not normal?’
It was a horrible accusation – something she would never say to a child. A memory returned, sharp as a shard of freshly broken glass: Jane Hill’s tenth birthday party – the pointing fingers and staring faces. Some of the mothers – not her own mother, of course; her own mother had not been there – other people’s mothers ranged around her, tall as houses, all crowding into the Hills’ kitchen, where they had taken her to be out of sight of the other children. Staring at her, their faces curious or anxious in varying degrees, whispering among themselves, someone saying in a low voice which she was not supposed to hear: ‘She’s not normal.’
One of them tried to give her a hug, but she had torn herself away, backing into the corner until the intervention of the draining board prevented further retreat; all the time that horrible music going on and on, the children’s voices half drowning it out with their shrieking now that the party games had resumed in the front room, while in the kitchen all those other mothers kept on staring at her.
With a determined effort, she focused her attention back on her sketch of the hills, but as soon as she did so she gave a little cry. She had ruined it – doodling in the bottom right-hand corner of the page when her mind was somewhere else. She pulled out her rubber and attacked the intrusion savagely, not stopping until the fat face topped by an old-fashioned policeman’s helmet had completely disappeared. Perhaps if she drew some rocks in the foreground it would cover the smudge.
She worked at the drawing steadily for some time before looking up again. Clouds of a simi
lar hue to the marks left by her rubber had begun to appear from behind the ridge above Torver. If she did not pack up and begin the return journey, there was a strong possibility she would get wet. It was always quicker going home – downhill all the way, for one thing. She saw no one as she hurried along the lane under the darkening sky. Everywhere looked barren at this time of year, before the daffodils brought a splash of colour to the roadside verges. There was a lot of grey in Cumbria, she reflected: stone buildings under slate roofs, walls instead of hedges.
When she opened the front door she saw that the postman had called in her absence. The face on the home-made picture postcard looked up at her from the mat. A chubby face surrounded by blonde hair, trusting blue eyes, pink baby mouth parted in a smile. She reached for the card with trembling fingers, turning it over to read the words printed on the reverse, although she had already guessed what the message would be, because she knew it off by heart: I still have her.
CHAPTER THREE
The enormous success of M. H. Tours was due in no small part to the influence of its co-founder, Marcus Handley. From the outset the company prided itself on providing a very personal service, and Marcus excelled in creating a sense that every possible thing was being done to ensure each traveller’s individual enjoyment and well-being. He exuded approachability, with no question too obscure or too trivial for the application of his undivided attention. He knew instinctively which of their – predominantly female – clientele would respond well to intellectual flattery, and which to gentle flirtation. Women liked Marcus, and men respected him. His long, thin face and shoulder-length curling locks, often held back by a pair of glasses perched atop his head in the fashion of an Alice band, gave him a scholarly appearance. He stood well over six feet tall, and was slim enough to make jeans work with an open-neck shirt and smart jacket. There was a comforting solidity about Marcus Handley which made people feel they could rely on him. He was the sort of man who, when helping you into the lifeboats, would still have found time for a pleasant word to everyone, remaining completely calm even as the liner was sinking beneath his feet.
This easy bonhomie required a level of concentrated effort, seldom suspected by participants of the tours he escorted. Marcus maintained his focus from the moment he appeared in the hotel foyer shortly before breakfast, until he switched off just before falling into bed at the end of each day, having often sat conversing in the bar until well beyond midnight. This attention to detail, which some might have defined as obsessive, Marcus merely deemed professional. Melissa, Jo and their other guides endeavoured to offer a comparable service, but Marcus did it best.
It was an absolute given that he and Jo did not interrupt each other’s working day with anything short of a major emergency, which was why her calling him on the mobile about the arrival of the postcard was so annoying. He understood that she was upset – of course he did – but the arrival of the card did not represent something about which he could, at that precise moment, do anything at all. And distressing as it was, they had been here before: it was not the first of its kind and nor, he supposed, would it be the last.
Marcus accounted himself an exceptionally patient man, who had always done his best to consider the feelings of others. He invariably approached issues pertaining to Lauren with the utmost sensitivity, but surely Jo could see that the arrival of the card – albeit unpleasant – did not constitute the kind of major emergency which licensed her to phone him at this most inopportune of moments, just when he was addressing his little group of Brontë devotees prior to their entering that literary Holy of Holies, the parsonage at Haworth.
The Brontë tour was not one of his favourites. Melissa generally escorted the Brontë tours, or else they were undertaken by Jenny, one of their part-time guides, who was a retired lecturer in English Literature. But Jenny’s daughter was about to produce a grandchild, Melissa was already committed to a week with some American women’s group who wanted to know all about Vita Sackville-West, and Jo had never accompanied the tour and didn’t know the material well enough, which was how he found himself standing in the Pennine drizzle, clutching a golf umbrella in one hand and a copy of Wuthering Heights in the other, when his mobile struck up with the William Tell Overture.
His immediate and obvious instinct was to anticipate bad news about his mother, but no – it was Jo, expecting him to indulge in a completely inappropriate conversation. Inappropriate because it never did to distract a group who had become utterly immersed in the theme of the trip. Conversations suggestive of a private life were off limits – whatever life he had beyond Charlotte, Emily, Branwell and the rest of their unfortunate family was something which belonged to an entirely separate world.
What kind of conversation about the card did Jo imagine he could possibly have with her, in the middle of a working day, during which he was never out of earshot of his charges? Any mention of ‘take it to the police’ would plummet his audience straight back into the twenty-first century and have them frantic with curiosity. They were all ladies of a certain age, hungry for second-hand excitement. ‘Is everything all right, Marcus?’ they would ask, voices a treacly mixture of solicitude and curiosity. Even if he employed a more ambiguous phrase, such as ‘We will have to talk about it later’, he risked a rumour running round the party that there was a problem of some kind, perhaps with the hotel they were heading for in Scarborough. Whispers of that kind, even when they subsequently proved to be incorrect, ruffled the surface of the smooth organization on which he prided himself; nothing but the view across the valley must be allowed to distract the ladies from their lunch in the Jane Eyre Tea Rooms.
So when Jo babbled out the reason for her call, Marcus said in the most casual voice he could muster, ‘I’m afraid you have caught me at a very bad moment. I’m just about to lead our party into the Brontë parsonage.’
Jo had babbled some more and begun to cry, but Marcus, still wearing an expression of benevolent amusement, while pressing the phone painfully hard against his ear to prevent the smallest sound from reaching the ladies standing nearest, waited until she paused for breath, then said, ‘Yes, of course. Why don’t we talk about it some other time?’ He rang off, and ostentatiously switched off his phone before replacing it in his jacket pocket, then turned back to the group with an apologetic smile. ‘The marvels of modern communication. A friend who didn’t know my schedule. So sorry, everyone – now back to the parsonage … When the family first arrived in 1820 …’
Naturally the episode had upset him, in spite of his apparent lack of concern. He might be cross with Jo for calling, but he did not like to think of her alone and upset. As his charges dispersed around the parsonage, exclaiming – as first-time visitors inevitably did – on the smallness of the interior, Marcus’s concentration ebbed in the face of a guilty sensation that he had let Jo down.
He wondered if she would contact the police straight away, and wished there had been a way of telling her to wait until he got home, because then at least he could give her some moral support. On the last occasion when they had taken a missive of this kind to the police, events had taken a rather unaccountable turn. He had been invited into an interview room by a CID man – a young chap full of false friendliness, accompanied by a stony-faced female colleague who, so far as Marcus could remember, had never uttered a word the whole time.
Just somewhere a bit more private to wait, the young policeman said, while Jo went in a separate room through the formalities of making a statement about receiving the card. Marcus had felt uneasy, but was uncertain how to refuse – and even more uncertain of what might be construed from a refusal. It had not been an interrogation – hardly even an interview – but after chatting in pretty general terms for a few minutes, the CID man had suddenly asked Marcus whether it had ever occurred to him that his wife might be sending the cards to herself.
‘And why on earth should she do that?’ Marcus asked, barely able to disguise his annoyance.
‘I don’t know, sir.’
The guy was very smooth. ‘To draw attention to herself, maybe? Perhaps to get some sympathy?’
‘And what particular aspect of my wife’s situation do you imagine she might want to get sympathy about, apart from the fact that her child was abducted some years ago and has never been seen since?’ Marcus’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. ‘Give me one good reason for suspecting that these communications aren’t either the genuine article or the work of a hoaxer. Better still, give me one good reason for suspecting that my wife is behind them.’
The policeman’s expression remained neutral, but he was watching Marcus closely and, to his intense embarrassment, Marcus could feel not only that his face had reddened, but also that he had started to sweat. He could see why the police were sceptical about the postcards. Every major enquiry attracted its dedicated loonies. There was nothing whatsoever about the cards to indicate that they were genuine, and no forensic clues which might have led to the apprehension of the sender. Until then the postmarks had mostly been illegible, but one of the early ones had been posted within easy driving distance of where they lived, and the most recent card had been posted in London, on a date when Jo herself happened to be there – a coincidence which they had remarked upon themselves.
‘Kidnappers don’t usually bother to communicate unless they’re asking for a ransom.’ The policeman’s voice was completely without emotion. ‘Then there’s the address. Your wife has moved about quite a bit since it happened; changed her name, too – but these cards have kept on coming.’
‘It can’t be that difficult to keep tabs on someone, if you put your mind to it. My wife has never been in hiding.’
‘Seems like a lot of trouble to go to, just for a hoax. Can’t quite see the point, can you?’