He walked over the lawn to meet him.
The man saw him when they were about fifty yards apart. He stopped for a moment and took some glasses from a pocket in his jacket and peered at him.
Paul thought he recognised him.
The man walked on and they met just below the front terrace.
“Hello”, said Paul. “It’s Mr Fuller isn’t it?”
The man frowned and looked him up and down.
“Do I know you?”
“I’ve probably changed a bit since the last time you saw me. And I’ve a got a few more clothes on.”
The man kept frowning. He was over 70 but looked fit. His hair was grey and wild and his face was wind-burned with leathery skin. He glanced over towards the island and then the Cottage. He grinned.
“You’re the Boyd lad.”
“I am, yes. Paul Boyd.”
They shook hands.
“You’re right, it’s been a while. How are you keepin’?”
“Not bad. How about you?”
The frown came back.
“You were in a bit of trouble, weren’t you? And I don’t mean that hanky-panky with young Miss Sarah… or the bandage on your head…”
“You could say that, yes.”
“Mmm… So what brings you here?”
“Greville Hartley left me the Cottage, the old gate-house.”
“Did he now? Well I never! He left me fifty quid and an old lawn-mower.”
“For how many years service?”
“Nigh on thirty-five. And I’m still here tryin’ to keep the place from fallin’ apart. Only it’s a new lord of the manor now, Mr Neil Morgan.”
The distaste in his voice and eyes was more than apparent.
“Yes. I’ve met him.”
The two men exchanged a look and understood one another.
“Terrible business, with Sarah missin’.”
“Yes.”
“Lovely girl…”
“Very.”
They exchanged another look.
“Anyway…”
“So is Mr Morgan around?” said Paul.
“No. He’s gone off somewhere. Left last night, I think. He called me this mornin’ and said he’d forgotten to set the alarm.”
“So do you still work here?”
“Not really. I supervise some of the gardenin’ work now and again. There’s no full-time staff any more, it’s all subcontracted out. And they need watchin’. Bunch of bandits. And Sarah asks me to drive her to the airport and stuff like that. Very generous tips too, bless her. Morgan wouldn’t give you the sweat of his cobblers.”
“Do you know where he’s gone?”
“He didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask.”
“Do you know when he’s coming back?”
“Same answer. Why? Did you need to see him?”
“No, not really. Just wondering. Anyway, I’ll let you go and turn the alarm on. Nice to see you.”
“Take care, son. See you.”
Paul walked back to the Cottage.
He poured himself another cup of coffee and sat on an upturned bucket in the back garden and lit a cigarette. He saw Fuller come down from the terrace and head for the main gate.
Something clicked in his head. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.
The Japanese bridge to the island was in a sorry state, as he had guessed, seeing it from the bank of the lake a few days before… When was that? But it was still firm enough to walk across, with care.
The grass here was long and dense and hadn’t been cut for a long time, but there was still the vague outline of a path. He brushed through nettles and bindweed and came to the summer-house. It was about six yards wide and deep, but still much smaller than he remembered it. He walked round it, anticlockwise, tripping over brambles and briars, and he had to step around a stack of rotten planks that was piled up against the back wall. A bird flew up from the undergrowth and he watched it flutter away to his right. He saw the two old rowing-boats that had once been moored at the jetty lying abandoned a few yards away, belly-up, ridden with rot and mould, half buried by weeds.
He came back to the front door and pressed the handle. The door was locked. He felt under a ledge beneath the skirting and found the key. He’d been expecting a rusty old Yale but it was shiny and looked as if it was a recently-made copy. The lock turned easily and he opened the door. For a moment he was rooted to the spot. The inside of the summer-house was pristine. The floor shone with a waxy shine and the table and the desk were free of dust. The curtains over the four large windows looked clean and fairly new. He smelt air freshener and furniture polish. On one of the window-sills, a vase of flowers stood in a diagonal ray of sunlight, and he was sure they hadn’t been dead for very long. A number of candles were set in holders on the table and on a shelf and the desk. They were burned down for about an inch or so, no more, and he could smell lemongrass.
He pushed the table to one side and knelt down and prised up one of the floor boards. He could see a square of old sack-cloth and smell the dust and a cleaner, sharper fragrance, like perfume. He slid aside another floorboard and removed the piece of cloth. This had been their hiding-place.
He pulled out a metal box. It was larger than the one he remembered, but otherwise almost identical. Black painted metal with a gold edge and a crest on the top, with red roses and a prancing unicorn. He took it over to the table and sat down and noticed his fingers were trembling. He opened the box.
He lifted out the contents. They slipped from his hands and spilled over the table. He swore, wondering if he had disturbed a particular order or arrangement that might have some significance.
He saw a dried, crumbling ring of daisies, linked together, from a necklace he had made for Sarah at some point from flowers they had gathered together, but he couldn’t remember when.
There was a photograph of Rebecca in her thirties, smiling, looking slim and tanned, with a foreign-looking house behind her.
There was a worn and yellowing copy of a programme for a pantomime in Leeds they had seen one Christmas when they were 5 or 6 years old, and Paul had a vision of them holding hands at a particularly scary moment.
There were three books: Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Catcher in the Rye, and Cannery Row, which Paul had given her for her 13th birthday. He opened it and saw what he had written on the back of the cover.
“Silent they may sometimes be, but never without thought”
Signed: Paul Boyd, 1995.
It had been his first attempt at poetry.
He put the books down and picked up a postcard. He had sent it to her from Filey, where he and his parents had spent a wet weekend one summer. He looked at the postmark. July 24th 1989. He had been eight years old. “Dear Sarah, we had fish and chips for diner and I saw a shark. Wish you were here, love Paul.”
A photo of him and Sarah together caught his eye. They were standing on the Japanese bridge, a brilliant gleaming red. He was looking one way, and Sarah the other. Robbie was snuffling about among the bushes in the background, just a puppy.
Paul breathed in and held his breath and breathed out as slowly as he could. He wished he had something to drink. Something harsh and strong, that would burn his throat and take away the taste of whatever was swirling in his stomach.
He leafed through more pictures and photos, the effect of each one like a nail driven into his head.
He felt cold and naked, more cold and naked than he had been on the moors so many years ago, as if the years of pretence and pretension had been stripped away and he was looking at himself in the mirror of his own past and he was reduced to the cold, frozen bones of a dead man.
That was the image he had of himself.
He wondered if he was feeling sentimental. But it wasn’t that.
What he felt was a sense of urgency.
He pushed aside a photo of Sarah riding a horse and he saw the shilling lying on the table at the bottom of the pile.
The shilli
ng he had given Sarah, for the first bird he had shot in Greville’s vegetable garden. 22 years before.
He picked it up and turned it over and saw the date, 1971. He could see Greville giving it him…
“Here you go lad, this was made in 1971, when it was a brand new decimal shilling. Ten pence. Almost twenty years ago. Well done. And there’ll be more to come. Bank on it.”
The King’s shilling.
And Sarah had kept it here.
In the hiding-place.
Except it wasn’t a hiding-place any more.
It was a shrine.
Chapter 34
July 12th 1995
Sarah is sweating and so am I.
It’s very hot.
We haven’t seen each other for 4 months and so we’ve had a lot of catching up to do.
We’re lying on a rug on the floor of the summer-house and we feel free.
Greville and Rebecca have gone to the opera in Manchester and aren’t due back till lunchtime tomorrow. My folks have gone to a party at Uncle Frank’s and that probably means a very late night. I’m supposed to be staying at Dave’s and Sarah’s supposed to be with a friend in Bradford, but we had a plan.
We’ve put anti-mosquito candles all over the place but they don’t seem to help very much. The windows are open and the breeze from the lake carries the little beggars in like nobody’s business.
We’ve been bitten all over.
Sarah’s rubbing some cream on a couple of bites on my back.
“They say saliva works well, too”, I say and I see a spark in her eyes.
“Go on, then” she says. “Let’s see you lick that one”.
And she points to a bite.
After a while, we’re not really sure whether saliva works or not, but we’re not really that bothered.
I’ve read a passage from The Lord of the Flies and Sarah read a bit from a book called Letters to a Young Poet by a man called Rilke, in German first and then in English. We like reading to each other and we share new finds and discoveries in our letters.
Since she’s been at Rushworth College we’ve been writing to each other a lot. We’ve had to, she’s only been home for a few days at a time at Christmas and Easter, and we’re not allowed to be alone together.
Not since Rebecca saw us that time.
We’ve met in public and with a parent or two present, and that’s been very weird. We’ve had to invent secret codes, like scratching an eyebrow means one thing and saying the word ‘cloud’ means another. It’s hard not to laugh sometimes and we often think we’re going to get caught out. And the codes don’t come anywhere near to what they really mean.
We’ve only met in secret once before and that was when Sarah taught me how to kiss without making a noise.
We were in Haworth. Sarah’s class was on a trip to the Bronte Museum and I was there with Dave and his Dad and a couple of other kids to visit the Worth Valley railway. We’d both got lost accidentally on purpose and found a little park for 15 minutes of peace and quiet. We were hiding among some bushes.
“Do you think deaf people get as much fun out of kissing as ordinary people?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when we kiss, we make a sound, don’t we?”
And we did.
“But if you think about how you make a kiss, when your lips touch someone else… a mouth, or a cheek or an arm, or anywhere… what do you actually do?”
I kissed the back of my hand a few times.
“Well, when you pull away, there’s suction, and it makes a sound…”
“Yes and no. You make the sound almost deliberately. But you don’t have to. If you let your mouth come away, without doing the sucking bit right at the end, you can make a silent kiss.”
I tried it. It worked.
“You’re right”, I said. “Silent kisses!”
“Yes. It’s not as much fun somehow, but it’s quite possible. It’s almost as if the sound is a part of it, to prove you’ve done a kiss.”
“Right, like people who kiss cheeks, but they don’t really. They just brush up against someone and make a kissing sound but they don’t actually kiss them.”
“So the sound can be to make a fake kiss.”
“Yes, the sound doesn’t make it a real kiss.”
“No. What makes it a real kiss is what you’re thinking when you do it.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“I’m thinking we’ve only got five minutes left”, she said. “So shut up.”
We have pubic hair now.
And we’ve been making jokes about Velcro.
But we don’t joke about everything. It doesn’t seem right.
We both know a lot of people at school who talk about things in sordid, vulgar ways using common language and swearwords and we both reckon they don’t know any better and probably haven’t even felt what we feel.
Like feeling full.
Like your head is filled up with good things.
They make things sound dirty.
Their minds are like a gutter.
But I found a line in a book that said something like ‘we’re all lying in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars’.
And I said this to Sarah and she said ‘That’s right, we are’.
And then we went outside and we lay on the grass and we really did look at the stars for a while.
But now we’re back inside and I know Sarah’s thinking about the next time we can meet and I whisper something in her ear and she smiles.
Then she puts some lipstick on and she knows I like that.
We drink some cider I took from the fridge and Robbie wakes up and wants to play but we shoo him away.
“We’re not children any more”, Sarah says, and she holds my hand so tight it almost hurts.
“No, we’re not”, I say.
Sarah’s sweating again and so am I.
It’s still very hot.
And then Greville walks in and it’s all over.
Chapter 35
Sunday April 28th 2013
It took him an hour and a half and a final bribe of fifty pounds but he found it.
The Meadowbank Haven, an assisted-living centre, with small bungalows nestling amongst laurel bushes, azaleas and maples. All of them with ramps and hand-rails leading up to the front doors. It was a few miles outside Keighley, on a slope overlooking a meandering stream and fields of black-faced sheep. He parked at the reception centre and asked for directions.
“Is she expecting you?”
“Yes”, he lied.
The woman at the desk looked him over and then at what he had in his hand and picked up a ringing phone.
“23”, she said, sliding the notes under a file.
He followed a snaking path past a small recreation centre with broad glass windows, where he could see a few bathers around a pool, and a life-guard helping a man out of a wheelchair. Two grey-haired men passed him, smiling, nodding hello, both wearing identical outfits, pale blue slacks and fawn sweaters and rimless glasses. One was tall and fat and the other was short and thin. They were holding hands.
He reached number 23 and saw a short, squat Asian woman in a green smock closing the door behind her as she came out, carrying a plastic rubbish bag. She glanced at him as he approached the door.
“How is she today?”, he said.
“She wouldn’t win Mastermind”, the woman said, scowling, and she slung the bag over her shoulder and walked towards a golf cart parked outside number 24.
He knocked on the door and pushed it open and walked into what looked like a three-room apartment. To his left was a simple kitchen, to his right a bedroom with an en-suite bathroom, and in front of him a living-room with broad French windows looking onto a lawn with a few rose bushes and a deckchair under an apple tree. She was sitting in an armchair looking at a newspaper.
“What have you forgotten now, Lucinda?”, she said. “You’re not getting old-timers’ disease too, ar
e you?”
“Hello, Rebecca.”
She turned to look at him and it took a good ten seconds for her to get an idea of who he might be. She tilted her head to one side and stared at him.
She wasn’t wearing an eye-patch. Her left eye looked perfectly normal. Her hair was almost white, with a faint purple rinse. Her cheeks were sunken and covered in liver spots and her teeth seemed too big for her mouth. Her whole head looked as if it were shrinking. The skin was tight and taut and her cheekbones and jaw and orbits seemed to be pushing their way through it.
“Have you come to apologise for Robbie?”
She turned back to her newspaper.
“Snow in Scotland at this time of year. Terrible”, she said.
“Why did Greville leave me the Cottage?”
“To think you were nearly one of us… it doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“Did he tell you?”
“ Envy… they call it the green-eyed monster, don’t they? Struck me as a good name at the time. Although I don’t know what envy had to do with it, not really.”
“Why did you tell Sarah I was dead?”
She dropped the paper on the floor and stood up and turned to face him. She seemed surprisingly sprightly and agile and Paul felt a certain force emanating from her. Not a positive force.
The last time he had seen her she had been sitting in a wheelchair.
She laughed. And she had the same crazed look on her face as at the funeral.
“He never needed to tell me anything. I always knew. The gate-keeper’s son, the dog-killer, inherits the earth. But not in my lifetime. Perish the thought.”
For a bizarre moment Paul remembered what the maid had said and was reminded of a Two Ronnies sketch, where a Mastermind contestant specialises in answering the question before last. He wondered if they were ever going to be on the same page. He had the distinct impression she would avoid it if she could. Maybe the rambling was deliberate. He hoped so, at least for her sake.
“So you’re not blind?”
The King's Shilling Page 20
