A cottage full of secret.., p.11
A Cottage Full of Secrets, page 11
13
When I woke up the next morning, I’d been going to fire up the laptop and do a more in-depth search for any information on the cottage, but I got distracted by having gone to bed and left the washing-up. Morning me was a bit cross at night-time me, because stuff was stuck on the plates and I’d left the apple tart out of the fridge so the pastry had gone soft and floppy. Night-time me, I decided, was a slattern, who didn’t deserve morning me, and I crashed the crockery around in the soapy water, with Brack giving me little worried looks from under the table where he’d settled with an old bone he’d dug up from somewhere.
Outside, Euan had been right, damn him, and it was raining. A slow gauze of drizzle, blocking the view and bringing the sky down across the fields until it nearly touched the end of the garden and putting a sheen of wetness across all the surfaces. I saw Euan, green coated and wearing a hat that looked like a camping toilet, carefully closing his front door and setting out up the lane, stopping every now and then to stare into the mist, like a still shot from a magazine.
That reminded me again of the photographs. Of Stella, so happy in 1971 but thinner and with that look in her eye by 1973. It was the expression that I recognised. I’d seen it on my own face often enough, caught in mirrors or in pictures that I’d had to stand and pose for. That look that said, ‘What went wrong?’ That look of having lost oneself somewhere underneath someone else’s idea of who I should be.
I took a mug of tea out to Jill when she arrived. ‘Thanks. Girls didn’t want to come in the rain.’ She took the tea from me and wrapped her hands around it. ‘Nice to have the choice.’
‘You didn’t have to. The rest of it will wait.’ I looked at the nearly finished wiring. ‘It’s secure and useable for now.’
‘Never leave a job unfinished,’ she said, with a meaningful look. ‘It’s twice as bad if you’ve got to go back to it.’
I thought of those caked-on plates and had to agree.
‘Did you do a search yet? On the cottage?’
We huddled down in the shelter of the high brick wall. The rain was coming from all directions at once in a grey, seeping mass. Jill didn’t really seem to notice, but I was getting damp. ‘Not yet. I’m going to have another try, the last search I did I only found planning information.’
Jill took a last swig and handed me back the mug. ‘Like I said, I’ll ask Mum. But she spends winters over in Crete with my sister, who lives there.’ A deep sigh. ‘Lucky bugger. All our conversations tend to revolve around why I don’t get myself a nice winter place and give up work. Honestly, it’s like she never had children or had to work herself. Just because Jenny married rich and old and ended up a widow with a house in Greece and a toy boy – well.’ Another sigh. ‘Mum usually comes back around the end of May. Once she’s back over here, she gets a bit more invested. I can ask about the cottages then.’
I took the mugs back into the kitchen. Euan was coming down the lane. I saw him stop at the fence to talk to Jill, leaning his arms against the sturdy post and rail that stopped the cattle from escaping, the rain decorating his green coat with water sequins, like a relic from the seventies. That reminded me of the pictures again. Scenes from a life that was probably still being lived, somewhere else. I picked one out at random, Stella in this kitchen only with an old cooker with electric rings and an eye-level grill and a white enamel sink. She had her back to the worktop and a pair of laundry tongs in her hand as though the photograph captured her midway through washing day. She was smiling, but it was the smile of someone told, ‘For Christ’s sake, smile, will you! You’ve got a face like a market trader’s elbow.’ That stretched mouth. Trying, trying to look happy enough.
But the eyes of someone who has died a little more inside at the insult. The eyes of someone who knows they can never get it right, however hard they try.
I tried the computer again, running through all the search terms I could think of. I managed to find some old photographs of the farm from the 1920s, when a passing local photographer had captured horse-drawn hay wagons coming into the yard, and I could see my cottage, with a lady in a flowered overall standing at the front. It had had the old style sliding sash windows back then, and a wooden front door that didn’t look as though it was ever used. But that was all. It was as though life went on in the rest of Yorkshire, but didn’t touch these little houses out here on the track in the hills.
On impulse, I picked up the photographs and fastened them to the fridge with one of the Cornwall fridge magnets that I’d brought with me. The comic-style map, with the piskies and the cream tea stuck over the outline of the county, looked at odds with the strained smile in the photograph on the top, but I didn’t change it. It was important, that juxtaposition of frolicking fairies and clotted cream with the expression in Stella’s eyes.
‘Did you get out?’ I asked the photo. ‘Or did you learn to live with it?’
There was no answer other than Brack crunching up his bone under the table.
A few days later, I found I’d started waking in the night. I thought I’d got over the shock of the silence of the nights but it seemed that my brain had decided again to realise that it was very, very quiet once it got dark. It seemed to like to worry me by prodding me awake at around 3 a.m. for a couple of hours’ fretting and wandering around the house, carrying a mug of tea and peering out of windows.
I’d rarely woken in the middle of the night in Truro. Well, not without cause, anyway. Here, every sound was magnified by the silence that surrounded it. An owl shrieking at the bottom of the valley would sound as though it was outside my window, the wind coming from the east caught at my windows and made them boom and the letter box rattle. Back in Cornwall, I’d been protected by the city around me. All night, traffic had drowned out the sounds of nature, and the twenty-four-hour shop at the end of the road had meant that there was a near continual stream of people dodging in and out for emergency booze top-ups or a sudden rush on nappies.
Here, the nothingness was both reassuring and a threat. I’d leap awake from a dream of being younger, looking after Gran or trying to get to work and failing to find a bus stop, and there would be nothing to distract my thoughts. Nothing outside my window but blank, whistling dark. This night was no different, except I thought I’d heard a noise.
First port of call was, as always, to check on Brack. He overnighted in his run now and I woke to a kind of distant and irrational fear that someone was trying to snatch him. I pulled a jacket over my pyjamas and, with my mobile phone torch held out like a beacon, I went out across the paddock. The run was, as ever, secure, and Brack was sleeping curled up with his nose under his tail, pushed into the shelter of the small tree. He raised his head at the sound of my approach, and then went back to sleep again. Clearly, I didn’t look as though I was about to either feed him or let him out, in my peculiar clothing combination.
I turned off the torch and looked around. I could hear the wind in the distant trees of the copse, but this far down the hill it was only a passing breeze. The faint glow in the sky off to the east that was Pickering was muted, and I could see the stars arching above me in the navy sky.
‘You’re out early.’ The voice came from the lane and made me jump so hard I dropped my phone.
‘What the…? Who’s there?’
The voice had been hushed, half-toned.
‘It’s me.’ Euan climbed over the post and rail fence that lined the track and then the wire strand that divided my paddock from the field. ‘You aren’t dressed.’
‘No, I was checking Brack. Why are you up and out?’ I tried to cover my confusion by searching the grass at my feet for the phone. I didn’t want to step on it and ruin any kind of air of confidence.
‘Dawn is the best time for wildlife.’ Euan shrugged himself deeper into the ubiquitous green coat.
‘But it isn’t dawn.’ I stared at the horizon, which was as black and star-strewn as the rest of the sky.
‘They would see me coming if it was.’ He bent down and picked up my phone, then handed it to me. ‘Want to come along?’
I thought about my warm bed. The mug of tea I’d left on the worktop. Then I thought about spending the time until it got light lying in the dark thinking about my mistakes. ‘All right.’
We stood for a moment or two. ‘You’d better get dressed,’ Euan said eventually. ‘You can’t come in your pyjamas. It’s cold.’
‘Oh.’
‘But you’d better hurry. It’s only an hour until dawn.’
I looked back at him over my shoulder. ‘An hour? How far are we going – Sheffield?’
‘And not the noisy coat.’ He leaned against the tall wall that formed the end of Brack’s run, easy and relaxed despite the dark.
I dashed in and hauled on some warm clothes. I was tying up my boots when I stopped suddenly, struck by the thought that I was going along with this without any fear.
Was this how it was meant to feel? Just a minor annoyance about having to hurry? The thought rocked me. But then Euan tapped on the kitchen window and I had to hasten myself into a big woollen jacket that made, as far as I was aware, no noise at all, and out of the back door to where he stood, carelessly resting against my patio furniture.
He nodded slowly when he saw me. ‘You’ll be too warm, but that’s all right.’
‘I don’t think I will.’ The night air was teetering on the edge of frost. I’d been horrified when the plant nursery had said that they weren’t selling tender plants yet because of the frosts. In Cornwall, they would have overwintered outside, and I’d had a jab of culture shock.
Euan didn’t say anything else. He just set off, over the fence, heading down the track this time. We followed the path until it met the metalled road which we followed for a while, then broke off to walk through damp woodland at the bottom of the valley. We crossed a small stream and then began to climb back up, but before we left the woodland completely, Euan put a hand on my arm and, with a finger to his lips, he pointed.
I couldn’t see anything. I scanned the edge of the wood. About ten metres beyond where we stood, the trees broke, there was an earth bank and then fields, and I couldn’t see anything more of note than trees gradually unfolding leaves where the early May sun got to them. I raised my eyebrows at him.
Euan nodded sideways, off to his left. I looked again. Two very small badger cubs had just emerged from the side of the earth bank and were sniffing at the ground, half-in and half-out of the hole. ‘Oh!’ I couldn’t help myself, caught by surprise at the sight. They instantly whisked away back underground, and I could have bitten my tongue.
‘You have to stay quiet,’ Euan observed. ‘Or they know you’re here.’
‘Sorry.’ I pulled a face. ‘Really. It was stupid of me.’
He looked at me; we were very close together with the trees pressing in all around us, so I could see his eyes reflecting starlight and the green of the burgeoning leaves. ‘They’ll be back,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘It was just so stupid,’ I whispered back. ‘I know I need to be quiet.’
He didn’t reply to that, but I felt my face flaming with the idiocy. A hand on my sleeve tugged me on and we emerged through the trees into the edge of a field where the grass grew thick and lush, pocked with bog cotton and tadpoled stretches of dark water.
‘Here. Sit down.’ He pulled at me again and we sank down onto a dry patch of ground, our backs to a hedge which ticked with a hidden electric fence, and the field running uphill in front of us. Dawn was beginning to glimmer, the light lifting to pale grey.
From a pocket, Euan pulled a flask, unscrewed the lid and poured. The smell of coffee, bitter and sharp against the scent of lightly crushed grass and damp, made my mouth water. He held the cup out to me. ‘We could be a while, so I always bring refreshments.’
‘Thank you.’ Yes, it was bitter, but hot and welcome. The warmth of the plastic mug in my fingers, the smell of the morning and the occasional brush of Euan’s coated shoulder against mine as we crouched in the hedge bottom almost made me want to laugh. ‘What are we waiting for?’
‘Anything that comes along.’ He took the cup from me and poured another dose of coffee.
‘There’s a rabbit over there.’ I pointed. The rabbit had probably been there all along and just become visible in the rising light, but, after my badger faux pas, I felt I had to contribute something useful.
‘Uh-huh,’ he said into the cup, and I had the feeling he was trying not to laugh. ‘I think we’ll just wait a bit longer.’
‘Sorry,’ I whispered again.
‘Tamzin.’ He looked at me now, dropping the cup to the grass and blinking that slow, delayed blink. ‘This is my job.’ His voice was only a little bit above a whisper so I found myself having to concentrate on the words to hear them above the sound of birdsong, which had risen noticeably. ‘You’re not supposed to know.’
‘What, I’m not supposed to know it’s your job?’ I hunched myself further down into my woollen coat. ‘Is it a secret?’
He laughed then, his whole face seemed to open up and lose the guarded expression that he usually wore, under the sideways hair and above the incipient beard. ‘No. I don’t expect you to know how to be around the animals. I’ve been doing this all my life.’
‘Creeping through hedges in the dark.’ I picked up the cup and handed it to him. ‘I bet the girls were just queueing up for you.’
I spoke without thinking. Again. Almost as though I’d forgotten how to watch my words and police my tone; almost as though none of that was important any more. I waited for his response.
It wasn’t what I expected or what I’d been half-bracing myself for. All he did was give a small smile which didn’t touch his eyes, a motion of his head that could have meant anything, and then he started pouring another cup of the fragrant coffee. My heartbeat settled back down again, and I realised how braced I’d been.
‘What’s that?’ I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. ‘Over there. Deer?’
He glanced up. ‘Ah. That’s more like it.’ The cup went down again. ‘Hare.’
‘Are you sure?’ The hazel-coloured creature was walking across the grass, coming towards us. It looked huge.
‘Yep.’ There was that note of humour again. ‘Adult male, by the look of it.’
He was drawing the hare in his mind, I could see it. The way his eyes fixed and only flickered to watch the movement of the animal as it loped slowly down the slope, still heading towards us, stopping now and then to sit, ears erect, or to drop its head to graze.
The light was lifting almost imperceptibly, moving from the grey to the white light of proper dawn. Further down the field, a red-brown bird descended from a tree and then rose away again to flutter stationary over the rim of the field.
‘Kestrel,’ Euan said to my unasked question, but he kept watching the hare’s advance. At a point about midway between us and the boggy patch of ground, the hare stopped and reared up. A lump on the ground that I had taken to be a clump of muddy grass suddenly got up and shot away, hotly pursued by the hare, until I could see they were two hares, sprinting their way across the field until they vanished into the opposite hedge-line. It had happened so fast that I’d hardly had time to register that I’d actually been staring at another hare all the time.
‘Did you know that one was there?’ I asked Euan, who’d picked up his coffee again.
‘I saw it go down.’ He sipped. ‘They go so still you forget they’re there. But I was watching the way the light looked on its fur as the sun came up.’ He waved a hand at the sky. Cautious beams of sunlight were creeping over the tops of the trees, giving half of the wood a wash of pale green.
‘Your drawings are incredible.’ I looked out over the field. He wasn’t seeing what I was seeing, I was fairly sure of that. Where I saw patchy grass growing and a hedge, he was seeing light and shade and all of the colours I was unaware of.
‘Thank you.’ Blink. ‘I can’t do anything else.’ A swallow of coffee. ‘Not quite true. I can play the guitar. But not very well.’
‘I never hear you. Through the wall, I mean.’
The cup went down and he was staring at the scenery again. ‘I don’t play any more,’ he said quietly.
‘Did the stroke affect that too?’ The steam from the coffee was spiralling upwards, dissipating slowly into the morning air. I watched it, because I didn’t want to look at his face.
‘I had a brain injury,’ he said, after I’d watched the coffee cool for a while. ‘The injury gave rise to the stroke.’ He stood up then, and held out a hand to help me to my feet. I realised how cold my hands were when I felt his grasp, his fingers were warm and damp from holding the coffee.
He hadn’t answered my question either, I noticed. Almost as though he was trying to give rise to a different conversation. ‘That sounds bad,’ I said, not wanting to lead him anywhere he didn’t want to go.
But he stayed there, back to the hawthorn, gradually letting go of my hand. ‘My wife hit me with a frying pan,’ he said. ‘On the head. The stroke came later.’ Now he was shaking out the coffee cup, screwing it back onto the flask and putting it away in his pocket, prosaic actions amid all the green beauty.
A bird began to sing. A warbled rise and fall of notes, so pure into the air that I almost didn’t want to say anything to interrupt it. But I had to say something to acknowledge his words. But what? He had a wife? That, given his appearance, wasn’t totally unlikely. That she’d hit him? But I didn’t know what part he had played, he could have been going for her with a knife.
So I picked the part that sounded oddest. ‘A frying pan? Those are heavy.’
‘This one was. Actually, I think it might have been a wok.’ He turned around, scanning the valley. I couldn’t tell if he was blinking, processing the words. ‘It didn’t seem important to ask.’
And now I had to know. ‘Was it a violent relationship?’
