In Your Silence

by Grace Lowrie

  ‘Dangerous?’

  ‘Yes, I believe there’s a natural spring, a well or something, inside... caves and boulders... I’m not too sure exactly; as I say I’ve never been in, but I think I’ve got a key somewhere. If you’re able to clear it out I’d be interested to see what it’s like...’

  ‘OK,’ I shrugged. ‘I’ll add it to the list.’

  I wasn’t about to admit it, but I was desperate to get my hands on the grounds of Wildham Hall. It was a massive challenge; far larger and more complicated than any project I’d taken on before, but it was exactly the sort of work I’d always aspired to. The before and after photos would look stunning in my portfolio, and it would also keep my mind from thoughts of Cally.

  Sinclair shifted uncomfortably. ‘Right, if it’s alright with you, I’ll leave you to explore the rest of the twenty-five acres of the estate on your own. But I look forward to receiving your quotation in due course.’

  ‘Great, thank you.’

  He nodded. ‘The gates will open automatically on your way out, and if I do decide to hire you I’ll provide you with a fob so that you can open them from the outside.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ I said, as he turned and headed back towards the house without further hesitation.

  With my skin still prickling from the sensation of being observed, I followed the great avenue of limes to its focal point – a classical domed folly with a marble seat inside – a Jane Austen type place in which to shelter on a rainy day. From there I travelled a ribbon of hoggin path along the bank of a stream. The water course appeared to be clogged with silt and plants, and the path had been completely destroyed. This, along with the mud and debris spread across the surrounding area, suggested the stream had burst its banks recently, probably more than once, which was something else I’d like to rectify given half a chance. A small rusty iron bridge carried me safely across the stream to where it fed into a wide lake. This too was cluttered with reeds and rushes and in need of dredging, though the water looked surprisingly clean and clear. At the lake edge, a modest boathouse attached to a matching timber dock invited further investigation, but it was all locked up and I couldn’t see much through the dusty windows.

  By the time I’d made my way back up to the Gothic mansion and climbed into my van, the sun was high overhead, my notebook was full, and my stomach was rumbling. But I was hooked. Now that I’d seen the full scale and potential of this place, I’d be gutted if I didn’t get the chance to restore it to its former glory.

  As I turned down the dark tunnel driveway I checked my side mirror and glimpsed a slight, pale figure in a window of the house. I was too far away to tell if it was a man, woman, child, or ghost, but as I drove away I experienced the heavy weight of their gaze, long after the dense trees had shielded me from sight.

  Chapter Four

  Jeez Louise, bugger off already. Gone were the days when I would miss Gregory; yearn for him to return from his frequent business trips abroad; pine for his company and misbehave simply to get his attention. Lately I simply wanted him to go away and stay away. I’d rather have the big old house to myself – free to roam the rooms undisturbed, eat whatever, whenever and wherever I wanted, and play my music loud. His mere presence, with all his particular preferences and outmoded rules, put me on edge and made me irritable. Yes Gregory loved me; provided a roof over my head and food for my belly... but right now I wanted to be left alone.

  It was Wednesday and he was still here. Thankfully he’d spent most of each day holed up working in the study, but I could smell him in every room. At meal times I had to sit and listen to the click and grind of his teeth as he carefully chewed each forkful of food, and endure his habit of dabbing at his mouth with a napkin after every other bite.

  Between meals I focused on my own work. Three more manuscripts had arrived for me over the weekend, and proofreading always required an intense level of concentration – kept my brain occupied. I’d completed my work ahead of schedule, but I wasn’t about to email the agency and let them know in case they increased my workload.

  So now I was using new and creative methods to bypass the usage controls and content filters on my laptop so that I could browse the internet. It was ridiculous; I was a twenty-one year old woman and Gregory was still trying to preserve my so-called innocence. I let him believe his own delusions. With some covert help from a couple of hackers I’d met in an online chat room, I was navigating loopholes and virtually exploring the world for myself, regardless of Gregory’s wishes. I happened to be browsing a website on Victorian pornography, of all things, when the entry system rang, and I crept along the landing to investigate.

  The landscaper that Gregory had invited to come and take a look at the grounds was a hulking great brute of a man, unlike anyone I’d ever seen before. He’d turned up in a white van with ‘Hunt Garden Services’ in green letters down the side; his jacket straining across his massive back and shoulders as he climbed out. His denim-clad legs were the size of tree trunks and he looked capable of crushing a person’s skull with his large hands. The purple bruising around his eyes and his crooked, almost-certainly broken, nose gave me the clear impression that he was violent and dangerous.

  I couldn’t hear what was being said, but instead of turning the stranger away, Gregory led him around the side of the house. Incredulous, and afraid to let them out of my sight, I rushed from window to window, leaving fingerprint smudges here and there as I pressed against the glass.

  On the terrace below, the landscaper scribbled down notes with the worn stub of a pencil in a battered notebook, and held his phone aloft to take photographs while Gregory waffled on, presumably about the work he wanted doing. Surely he wasn’t considering hiring this ugly oaf? Even his name – Hunt – it sounded so threatening! What about when Gregory went away again? What if he tried to force his way into the house and steal my virtue? I shivered.

  Surreptitiously I tracked the man around the estate from all the bedroom windows and even from the tower room up on the second floor. But he did little other than gaze around, taking more pictures and writing in his book. Once he’d driven away and the gates had safely clanged shut behind him, I scrawled a message on my forearm and stomped downstairs.

  Gregory was back in his study, seated behind his desk, carefully cleaning a hunting rifle with an array of small rags and brushes. The smell of the solvent tickled my nostrils as I glanced at the unlocked cabinet on the wall, which still contained his other four weapons, and back at the various dismantled pieces of gun laid out on the surface before him. He looked up at me as I approached with my arm stuck out before him.

  ‘I don’t like him,’ he said, reading my words aloud. He sighed, weighing the barrel in his latex-gloved hands. ‘Well I do. And if his quote is reasonable I’ll be employing him, so you’d better get used to the idea.’ Dismissively he returned his attention to his weaponry.

  I crossed my arms and glared at him, but he wouldn’t look at me, his mind was made up. Turning on my heel I stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind me. There was more than one way to skin a cat.

  Chapter Five

  ‘We’re being watched,’ Olly said, setting down a fresh bucket of mortar.

  I didn’t look up from the paving joint I was packing. ‘Yeah, I noticed. Hey, careful where you’re putting your feet.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, don’t worry.’ Olly stepped gingerly across the terrace, hunched down with his pointer and recommenced smoothing and finishing the cracks I’d filled. ‘So, do you think she’s the wife, the sister, the daughter, or what?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘She looks nearer my age than yours, but I dunno if she’s too old to be the daughter...?’

  I didn’t comment. Mainly because I was a man of few words anyway, but also because that sort of speculation was unprofessional. Working with Oliver Dent made me even less inclined to speak; the lanky eighteen-year-old never shut up. Was it because he came from a large family that he felt compelled to voice every single
thought that entered his head? Maybe it was the only way he could make himself heard over eight other siblings. Whatever the reason, he suffered from a chronic case of verbal diarrhoea – or rather he had it and I suffered.

  But I wondered about her too; the mysterious girl observing us from the house. Almost three weeks had passed since Gregory Sinclair had given me the go ahead to restore the sprawling grounds of his mansion, and he’d been absent almost all of that time, working abroad. He’d left us with access to an outbuilding equipped with power sockets, a kettle, an outdoor tap and a flushing toilet; so that we would have no excuse to set a muddy boot inside the house. A cleaner – a stroppy, middle-aged, Irish woman with a sharp tongue – visited Wildham Hall three days a week, but otherwise no-one came or went except for the postman and the odd delivery driver.

  I’d glimpsed the lady of the house a couple of times – she was petite, with jaw-length flame-red hair and a heart-shaped, elfin face. On both occasions she had immediately ducked out of sight, but I felt her eyes on me almost constantly.

  ‘She’s definitely cute, though – maybe I should go introduce myself; she might be shy...’ Olly mused.

  ‘Just concentrate on what you’re doing.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I got this. I’ll go talk to her later. So, is this going to be like a permanent thing?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You and your bro working on separate jobs?’

  ‘Well, if this commission goes well and I can get more work like it, then hopefully, as a company, we can offer landscaping as well as maintenance.’

  ‘So Lester will still run the maintenance team and what, you’ll have, like, a landscaping team of your own?’

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  ‘Can I be in your squad?’

  I laughed. ‘Maybe. I think Lester needs you back next week; I’ve only got you on loan.’

  ‘But this place is massive, you’ll never get it all done by yourself.’

  ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence, Olly.’

  ‘But it’s true; it’s gonna take you, like, forever.’ Straightening up he gazed off towards the lake in the distance.

  ‘Lucky for me the client isn’t in any particular hurry – I’ll get there.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess. But it’s cool working here; repairing the balustrades, relaying slabs – this terrace looks a million times better and we’re not even finished yet... I feel like I’m actually learning something here, y’know...?’

  ‘Good, I’m glad.’ Sitting back on my haunches I glanced up at Olly; he looked uncharacteristically glum. ‘Look, maybe you can come back and work with me once the cold weather sets in. Things will ease up maintenance-wise, Lester won’t need you so much, and there’ll still be plenty to do here.’

  ‘Sweet,’ he said, flashing me a grin and crouching back down over his work.

  In a rare moment of quiet I savoured the melodic tune a robin was emitting from within a cherry tree and identified what I thought might be a skylark singing in the distance.

  ‘Maybe I’ll offer her a cuppa tea next time I see her, whaddya think?’

  ‘Leave her alone, Olly.’

  ‘What? It wouldn’t hurt...’

  ‘It might – I wouldn’t wish your tea on my worst enemy.’

  Chapter Six

  Ugh. I was behind with my work; I still had a manuscript to finish correcting by the end of the week, but I was restless and couldn’t concentrate. It wasn’t so much the amount of noise they were making, because I could easily sit on the other side of the house where even the rhythmic whirr and thump of the cement mixer couldn’t be heard. It was their very existence here; knowing that they’d invaded my private space; that was the issue.

  If I was honest, they intrigued me. Not the younger one so much – the gangly teenager who talked too much – but the big one. I still found the monstrous scale of him morbidly fascinating. He looked marginally less fierce now that the swelling and bruising on his face had subsided, and his movements were oddly unhurried, deliberate and assured – engrossingly so.

  I noted the precise way the muscles in his arms, legs and back, bunched and stretched as he worked; the ease with which he lifted enormous slabs of stone; and the accuracy with which he troweled mortar into the narrow gaps between the flagstones, with a practised scoop and flick of his wrist. Patches of sweat slowly spread through his faded T-shirt as the sun rose, bright and burning, in the sky above.

  I had virtually no experience of men at all. Gregory had always encouraged me to stay within the safe boundaries of the property – supposedly out of concern for my welfare – and I was happy to go along with that most of the time. Instead of going out, everything I needed came to me. But most of the visitors to this house were women – a proliferation of housekeepers, cooks, cleaners and tutors had been here over the years, but very few men. A faceless assortment of uniformed couriers came and went, but they had instructions to leave all deliveries in an outbuilding, so I hardly ever saw them, regardless of whether a signature was required or not.

  Every three months Finnegan arrived to clean the outside of the windows, repair anything that might need fixing, and touch up the paintwork. But for all his spryness he was at least seventy years old; a stringy fellow with skin like creased leather.

  Once a team of Polish guys came to repair the roof. They winked and waved at me from the scaffolding, but barely spoke any English. They were boring to watch and before long I simply forgot they were there. With no real friends and no television, my main experience of men came from books, horror movies and, more recently, the World Wide Web. I’d never come across a giant like Mr Hunt before.

  I was staring again.

  The doorbell rang and I jumped, startled by the rare sound. It couldn’t be him because he was still on the terrace below; it must be his loquacious assistant. I hesitated, tempted not to answer at all, but then what would be my excuse for such antisocial behaviour? He knew I was here. It rang again and I hurried through the house, down the back stairs and along the hall to the front door.

  ‘Alright? Sorry to bother you, I saw you through the window; figured I’d come and say hello.’ He had sunburn across his nose, a smile like a wide-mouthed frog and something, which looked like porridge but was presumably wet concrete, smeared in his floppy fringe. ‘I’m Olly, by the way. We’re fixing up your patio back there,’ he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. ‘It’s perfect weather for it, nice and dry...’ His smile faltered slightly when I didn’t react. ‘Anyway, I’m off to put the kettle on and I wondered if you fancied a cuppa...?’

  This time his eyes narrowed slightly at my lack of response so I shook my head.

  ‘No? OK, no worries.’ He stepped backwards away from the door and I closed it, firmly, before he had a chance to say anything else.

  Mentally congratulating myself on a situation well-handled, I headed back upstairs and returned my attention to my manuscript with fresh determination.

  Soon after six the two men piled into their van and disappeared down the drive, leaving me entirely, blissfully alone. It was warm on the terrace. The smart, newly-pointed paving had been washed down but was already drying in continent-shaped patches. Slipping off my shoes I walked barefoot, letting the smooth warmth radiate up through my soles. I squatted where the giant had been crouched, running my fingertip along the firm damp channels between the stones, where the mortar he had so adeptly introduced was now setting hard. There was no staining, no gap still to be filled, no bits he’d missed as far as I could tell; he took pride in his work and it showed. In one corner where a tree cast shade, I found a wet hand-print, where he had braced himself for balance while reaching for a brush. The print was already fading but I placed my own hand in the centre, where it was dwarfed by his palm, and where each of his long fingers outstripped my own.

  In what was once the old tack room, in the stables on the north side of the house, lay the landscaper’s tools – a large shovel crusted at the edges with rust and dried concrete
; a still-wet but empty bucket, ringed with tide lines; a soft broom; a stiff brush; and a flat, pointed, metal hand-trowel. This last item had a smooth, worn, wooden handle. It was too big for my hand but as I wrapped my fingers around it I imagined it moulding neatly to Hunt’s ample palm.

  Across the back of a chair was the padded jacket he had arrived in almost two and a half weeks ago when it was cold and pouring with rain. Lifting it up to my face I inhaled. It had a soft fleecy lining and still held his scent – a subtle, not-unpleasant, soapy smell – though I’d not seen him wear it since. He wouldn’t need his jacket on an evening as mild as this, but had he missed it on Tuesday night during that heavy thunderstorm? Was he out then, or tucked up warm and dry at home? What did a man like that do in his spare time? Drink? Fight? Fuck lots of women? That was the correct verb wasn’t it? With a shiver I returned the jacket to the back of the chair and stepped back out into the evening sunshine. Why did I even want to know?

  Chapter Seven

  I’d spent the best part of a fortnight getting snagged, scratched and stung while I single-handedly dug out great swathes of nettles, thistles and brambles from the area up near the house. But I was in my element. To reinstate the structure of the neatly-edged beds I’d run a series of string lines and clipped the miles of box hedging back into shape, and between the parterres I’d strimmed and mown the formal lawns so that they now resembled shaggy green carpets rather than meadows. Together with the freshly-restored terrace, the immediate vicinity of Wildham Hall was now taking shape and looking fantastic – if I did say so myself.

  Of course the beds were devoid of flowers at the moment because I wanted to wait for autumn. If I planted in the height of summer, the poor buggers would struggle to get enough water to stay alive, let alone get their roots established. And the lawns would require further weeding, feeding and scarifying before they were anywhere near croquet-playing standard. Even so, I was pleased with the progress I’d made and enjoying my work.