Too Near the Dead

by Helen Grant

  “Never,” agrees James cheerfully.

  I put the glasses back into the sideboard and pick up others. “What did Laura say?” I ask him. I keep hoping he’ll say, She’s pulled off this huge deal and now I know the money’s coming in there’s something I want to tell you. But he doesn’t say that.

  “She’s sold rights in Lithuania. No news on the film. And she’s nagging me about the new book.”

  “Well,” I say lightly, “What are you standing around here for? Shouldn’t you get back to work?”

  “No rest for the wicked,” says James. “I need coffee first. Do you want tea?”

  I shake my head. “I’ve just had one.”

  After he’s gone, I sit for a while on my heels. I think about what James didn’t say, and I look into the sideboard, as though those white porcelain flowers are going to materialise in there if I just concentrate for long enough. I didn’t move them. James says he didn’t move them. But then who did? I have that feeling again, that there’s something right in front of me, something I’m not grasping.

  I think about the night I sleepwalked and woke up downstairs. Is it possible that I moved them when I was asleep? I don’t think I did, but I hardly trust myself any more. When I dream, I see and hear and feel things that are not there. Objectively, whatever I heard and felt in the ruined chapel wasn’t really there either. It occurs to me that perhaps the same is true of the white porcelain flowers. Maybe they were never there at all. Maybe I imagined them. I press a hand to my face. No. I didn’t imagine them. I saw them and I know Belle did, too. She had them in her hands, for God’s sake.

  Later that day, when James has gone into the town for something, I video call Belle on my phone. I feel self conscious about doing this. We’ve messaged plenty of times since she visited, but we haven’t spoken. I guess we were both thinking the same thing: least said, soonest mended.

  When Belle appears, she isn’t looking at me – she’s looking at whatever else she’s doing. I can see at first glance that her hair is no longer magenta; now it’s turquoise.

  “Go away, Brendan,” Belle says to someone I can’t see. “I’m about to talk to my bestie.” She pauses. “I mean it. Buzz off.”

  “Hi, Belle,” I say.

  “And shut the door,” she adds, sternly. Then she says, “Fen. How are things in Brigadoon?”

  “Sunny,” I say evasively. “What about London? Streets paved with gold, as usual?”

  “I wish.”

  We chat for a bit, about Belle’s job and about work – “I literally cannot believe you said yes to that!” says Belle. I update her on the wedding plans, telling her about the chapel where James had to reverse away from the tractor. I don’t mention the ruined chapel on our own land. Eventually, however, I get to the point.

  “Belle, you remember when you were up here and we were emptying those removal boxes in the dining room?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you remember unpacking a kind of decoration made of white flowers?”

  “Yeah, I remember that. Weird sort of table decoration or something.”

  “Can you remember what you did with it?”

  “I put it in that cupboard in the dining room, like you told me to.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure.” Now Belle is looking directly at me, with her head on one side.

  “And you didn’t move them after?”

  “Nope. What’s the matter, Fen?”

  “Nothing,” I said, as lightly as I can. “I was just looking for them and they’re not in there any more.”

  “Maybe James moved them.”

  He just told me he didn’t.

  “Yeah, that’s probably it,” I tell her. “It was just bugging me a bit. I hate losing track of things.”

  “That’s what happens if you live in a huge country house,” says Belle. “You probably left it in the East Wing or something.” She leans towards the screen, peering at me. “Are you sure nothing’s the matter?”

  “Absolutely sure.”

  “You look a bit... I dunno, stressed.”

  “It’s that thriller. You’d be stressed if you had to read 90,000 words of that.”

  “I did warn you,” says Belle, rolling her eyes.

  Not long after that, we ring off. The phone still in my hand, I sit and gaze out of the window, not really seeing anything.

  It’s just a stupid ornament, I say to myself. Who cares what happened to it? I rub my temples with the fingers of my free hand, squeezing my eyes tight shut.

  Who cares?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  First, I’m aware of a clock ticking. It sounds eerily loud, because there is no other sound in the room. A faint light is slanting through the window, outlining the dim shapes of heavy old-fashioned furniture. It is evening. The colour is fading from everything with the dying of the light; soon it will be altogether dark. I look down at my hands in my lap, and I see without surprise that I am wearing a long dress with voluminous skirts. The boned bodice is a cage against which my flesh is pressed almost painfully tightly. The colour is grey in the low light, but I know that it is really lavender – the colour of half-mourning. The ring on my right hand has a cluster of pearls on a black enamel ground, set into gold.

  The clock begins to chime, a series of shrill notes that seem to shiver on the air, and then it strikes the hour. I count six, and each successive strike is a distinct and sharp pang. The hour of six has a terrible meaning for me.

  I rise from my chair with a rustle of heavy fabric and move slowly across the room, threading my way between overstuffed chairs and fussy little occasional tables loaded with dusty ornaments. I am impelled to do this, drawn by some unseen undertow. My skirts sweep the floor; my shoes move over the soft nap of a rug and then resound crisply on polished wood. The door stands ajar, the unlit passageway beyond it a dark tunnel. I plunge into it, feeling my way along the wall with outstretched fingers.

  I perceive all this as though through a series of transparent layers: there are the bare details of what I see, and there is myself, Fen, and there is something that is not-Fen, a thing whose actions I must perform and whose feelings seep into mine like a bitter stain. Pale fingers move along the dusty wallpaper, feeling its texture under the sensitive tips, and they are not my fingers but I feel them anyway.

  Ahead of me I see twin columns of coloured light glowing softly in the darkness and I see that they are stained glass panels set into a door. I make my way haltingly towards them. My hands reach unerringly for the metal bolts; they know how to unfasten the door in the dark even if I, Fen, do not. I pull the bolts back and turn the handle, pulling the door towards me.

  Cool evening air rushes in. I stand for a moment, still within the threshold of the house, framed in the doorway like a plover in the mouth of a crocodile. I know this view. This is what I see when I open the front door of Barr Dubh House. Oh, the sweep of the drive is different, and the trees that line the first part of it are smaller – younger. But the landscape is the same: the shape of the hills, the patches of forest.

  The sun is setting behind me, behind the house. Every detail of the view is picked out with sharp contrast and all of it gives me the most exquisite pain. I know that there is an absence imprinted upon that view. There is a longed-for return that will never happen, not even if I stand here forever. The sun may rise and set again a thousand times or ten thousand times and I will never see that familiar figure at the gate again nor hear that firm tread on the path that leads up to the house.

  I step out of the doorway and walk a dozen paces, turning my face up to the darkening sky. Grief is a great lump in my throat. I drop to my knees and even through the thick fabric of my skirts the sharp stones cut into my flesh. I put my face to the ground and it smells of cold damp earth, of things that were once alive, now disintegrating. I close my eye
s and make the world dark.

  “Fen?”

  With a great effort I open my eyes, and find that I am lying in a broad stripe of golden light spilling out from the front door of Barr Dubh House. Everything else is dark. I am so cold and stiff that at first it is completely beyond me to move, to unfold myself from my huddled position on the ground.

  James is crouched by me, his hands hovering over me as though he is afraid to touch me in case he breaks something. The light is behind him so I can’t see his face, but I hear the panic in his voice.

  “Christ, Fen. What happened? Say something!”

  “James,” I say. “I’m cold.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No,” I say. I have to drag the words out of myself. “Just cold.”

  It feels as though it would be easier to shut my eyes again and drift off into the numbing dark, but James is having none of it. He gets an arm around me and hauls me up onto my feet, and since those don’t seem to be very steady he supports me as I stagger back into the house. The gravel nips at my feet. He puts me in the chair in his study, because the room is small enough to warm up quickly if he puts the heater on. He fetches the duvet from the guest room and covers me with that, and then he makes me a mug of tea. He pours himself something that smells suspiciously like Scotch. Then he pulls over the desk chair, sits down next to me and looks me in the eyes.

  “Fen, what happened?”

  My fingers and toes are burning as the life comes back into them.

  “I don’t know,” I say, but I can see that won’t be enough. Worry is etched into James’s face. “I dreamed I went outside.”

  “You dreamed it? So you were sleepwalking?”

  I look at him listlessly. “I suppose so.”

  “I woke up and you weren’t there,” he says. “I thought, oh, she’s just gone for a glass of water or something, and I was going to go back to sleep. But it was taking me a while to drop off again and I started to wonder where you were. If I hadn’t...”

  He falls silent, not wanting to pursue that line, and takes a mouthful of the whisky. After a while, he says, “Have you ever sleepwalked before?”

  I shake my head. “Not that I know of.” Then I think of the night I woke up from a dream to find myself sitting in an armchair downstairs. I open my mouth to tell James about this but before I can speak he says, “Fen, are you happy here?”

  “James...”

  “Because you seem distracted a lot of the time. You’ve been like it since Belle came up. And then this...”

  “I’m tired,” I say. This is true. I feel as though I could just close my eyes and drop off, right here in the armchair. “I’m not sleeping very well. I keep having these weird dreams.”

  “That night after Belle went, when you woke up yelling, you said it was like being dead. And now... you dream you’re walking out of the house. I’m not a psychologist, but...” He grimaces. “It seems like you’re not happy about something.”

  In spite of the cold exhaustion encasing me, this kindles a spark of alarm.

  “I’m not unhappy, James.” This is true: I am uneasy, and confused, and sometimes actually afraid, but I am not unhappy, not in the way he means. Not with him. I can’t be. “I’m just... I don’t know. Maybe I’m still getting used to sleeping in a new place. It’s so different from the flat – it’s so quiet here.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” says James seriously. “Maybe it’s too quiet. It’s great for me – I’ve never been so productive. But you’re used to having other people round you. When I’m shut in here with my laptop, you’re on your own.”

  “I’m supposed to be working too,” I point out.

  James is silent for a little while. Then he says, “What’s wrong, Fen?”

  He says it as though he’s bracing himself for bad news. I know with a sudden chilling certainty that now is the moment to tell him that I know about his debt. He’s asking me for honesty.

  I can’t do it. I’m freezing cold and exhausted and afraid. Right now I just want James to hold me tight. I don’t want to see the shock spilling across his face when he finds out what I’ve done, when his secret is out.

  The silence stretches out until it feels like a barrier between us.

  At last James says, “Fen, if it’s not working out here, we could go back, you know.” He puts out a hand and touches my wrist, his fingers warm against my cold skin. “We could rent this place out and go back to London for a while. Or permanently. Nothing’s been done that can’t be undone.”

  He means it, too. James is not afraid of making big decisions, nor of the myriad of logistical problems that follow them like a swarm of biting insects. I’m the one who thinks of the practicalities first: the things we have and haven’t done to Barr Dubh House, the probability of finding a tenant or buyer, the difficulty of finding anywhere affordable in London. The cost of moving. Money. Money.

  I make those kinds of decisions when I have to; when my back is against the wall. My mind skips back to that afternoon in my old university room: the way the flames leapt up from the stack of law books; the heat on my face. It was the same with getting out of London: I did it to escape. My old life was wearing me out. Barr Dubh is the fairytale castle I struck out across the freezing water for, and I am determined that this time the magic will be real.

  I shake my head. “I don’t want to go back to London. I want to stay here, at Barr Dubh.”

  “But Fen–”

  “James,” I say, as firmly as I can, “The things that are wrong were wrong before we came here. I still miss my brother. I’m never going to stop missing him. And I’m never going to sort things out with my parents. I don’t even know how to think about them. I don’t know if I should feel guilty or grateful or both or nothing. Sometimes I think about them and it hurts, but I think maybe it doesn’t hurt enough and so I just try not to think about them. But if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be here at all. It’s all mixed up in my head and...” I hesitate. “Maybe I just need more time.”

  Everything I tell him is true, although the things I haven’t said hang over me. At any rate, I have convinced James, even if I haven’t convinced myself. There’s no more discussion about leaving that night. When the tea is finished, James gently takes the mug out of my hands and takes me upstairs, still wrapped in the duvet. We get back into bed, and he pulls me close so that the last of the chill is absorbed into the warmth of his body.

  I lie with my face pressed into the side of his neck, listening to his breathing becoming slower and deeper as he descends into sleep. I think about the night he came home late from Spain, when I watched the car headlights coming up the lane, and I think about the dream of standing on the doorstep looking east for someone who would never come, and soon the two things are jumbled up in my head. I press myself close to James, as close as I can, and follow him down into sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  When I imagine it, it’s always a bird’s eye view. I am flying high above the landscape on invisible wings, rising and falling with the air currents. In the far distance, the horizon is a shimmering blur. Below me, the countryside is spread out like a rumpled green velvet cloth patched here and there with fields of yellow rape. It is bisected by a road that runs east to west, winding its way around natural features – a hillock, a bend in a river – like a stream finding its way amongst boulders. I hover above this road, facing east, looking for the flash of reflected sunlight from a windscreen that will tell me there is a car speeding towards me.

  There. The light winks at me before the vehicle disappears briefly under the cover of some overhanging trees. The road has many features like this: canopies of vegetation throwing shade across the tarmac, sharp bends that swing the vehicles perilously far out, dips that conceal them altogether. It is a sly, deceitful road, not taking travellers directly and honestly from A to B in the open sunshin
e but leading them into any number of traps.

  The car that is approaching is a dark grey saloon, a souped-up model from an expensive manufacturer. The numbers on the clock do not even run into five figures yet: the car is very new. At the wheel of the car is Michael Haig, aged forty-two, salesman, golfer, connoisseur of malt whisky, father of one and recent participant in an extremely messy divorce. Mike is late for a meeting so he is speeding, grasping the wheel with one hand and holding his mobile phone to his ear with the other, trying to call the client to let them know he’s on his way. He ought to be using hands-free but he hasn’t set it up in the new car yet, a fact that will be commented upon later: the company should enforce it. Of course, he could pull over to make the call, but he’s already running late. Mike’s colleagues all agree that he is very conscientious; he would do anything to avoid being late for a client meeting. It’s possible that they might privately agree that he is a bit of an arsehole: he has had several tickets for speeding already and if he gets another one it will probably mean a ban. But they won’t be expressing this view in the future, not under the circumstances.

  Mike knows the road pretty well, so he drives confidently – overconfidently, some might say, assuming that he will not encounter other vehicles in places where he has never encountered them before. He goes wide at the curves, the tyres of the expensive saloon crossing right over the white lines. After the next couple of bends there is a straight stretch, and he intends to put his foot to the floor and regain a few lost minutes.

  A mile or so west, a car is travelling towards Mike from the other direction. This is also an expensive model of car, though older than Mike’s. The bodywork is gleaming black, a sober, respectable choice of colour befitting the profession of the owner, who is a judge: my father. In the passenger seat is my mother, her handbag at her feet. The pair of them are travelling to see my mother’s sister, my aunt. They are not without a sense of family, these two, even though they no longer really speak to their daughter. They visit my aunt every other month, and in the intervening months she comes to them.