Fireside Gothic

by Andrew Taylor

  I didn’t want to think about Mary.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you go inside and get warm and dry? If there’s anything I can do to help, just tell me. Help you look – whatever. Otherwise I’ll go away. It’s up to you.’

  I stood aside from the door. She came closer. The light from the doorway showed me the whole of her, for the first time.

  Now I saw that she was smaller than me, little taller than my shoulder. She wasn’t wearing a hat. The rain or perhaps the salt spray had soaked her hair, making it black and glossy, plastering it against her scalp. She glanced up at me as she passed into the cottage. Her features were delicate and regular. I saw the smudge – bruise or birthmark? – on her cheekbone. But what I really noticed were her eyes, which were large and dark.

  She paused in the doorway. For a long moment we looked at each other.

  ‘You’d better come in, I suppose,’ she said.

  7

  The strange thing about what happened next was that so much of it didn’t feel strange. It seemed not exactly normal – never that – but natural, in the way that water flowing downhill is natural or the pleasure of eating when you are hungry.

  I followed her into the cottage and closed the door. She took off her oilskin and hung it on a peg on the back of the door, leaving it to drip on the floor. Underneath she wore a shabby khaki trench coat, which looked as if it had come from a charity shop, over a grubby white dress.

  Not a dress, I realized, as she crouched by the stove a moment later. A nightdress.

  She opened the stove door and threw a handful of driftwood inside, followed by a shovelful of coals. There was a kettle on the top of the stove. She lifted it, testing by the weight how much water was in it.

  ‘It’s quite hot,’ she said. ‘It shouldn’t take long to boil once the fire gets going. Tea?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no milk.’ She frowned. ‘Or sugar.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘We could have cocoa. But it’s horrible without milk.’

  ‘And it’s even worse without sugar,’ I said.

  We smiled at each other.

  ‘Tea, then.’ She glanced at me. ‘Do take your coat off and sit down. Unless you’re too cold.’

  I took off the coat and hat and hung them on the empty peg next to hers. She went into the kitchen and came back with a teapot and two cups and saucers on a tray. The china was pretty – Art Deco and very delicate; unexpected in this wreck of a place.

  She set down the tray on the table and for the first time seemed to notice the untidiness of the room. While I sat watching from the sofa, she picked up the chair that had fallen over and scooped up handfuls of books and papers from the floor.

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘No.’ She looked up. ‘I’m Sophia, by the way.’

  I told her my name. ‘What happened?’

  She didn’t answer. She gathered up the rest of the papers and dumped them on the table. She picked up the two blankets. She handed one of them to me.

  ‘Put it over you,’ she said. ‘It’s so horribly cold. It never gets warm here. Or hardly ever.’

  She sat down beside me and wrapped her own blanket around her. She was shivering. We listened to the weather and sea and the fuel settling in the stove and the sound of each other’s breathing. We both stared at the stove, at the kettle, as if willing it to come to the boil. It was very dim – a single hurricane lamp doesn’t throw out much light. To an outsider we must have looked like an old country couple, side by side under our blankets, still in our wellington boots, staring wordlessly at the stove: a tableau of the depressed rural poor, exhausted after the day’s drudgery.

  ‘We had a quarrel, you see,’ she said.

  There was no warning. She didn’t look at me. She might have been talking to herself.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Max and I.’ Sophia shifted on the sofa. ‘It’s not unusual.’

  ‘Is he your husband?’

  ‘My lover.’

  A native English-speaker would have said ‘my partner’, I thought. ‘Where is he, then?’

  ‘He walked out.’

  ‘In this weather?’

  ‘That was probably part of the reason.’ She touched the cheekbone where the bruise was. ‘He likes the grand gesture.’

  ‘You must be worried. Do you want me to go and look, or—’

  ‘No, no, no. I’ve already been down to the beach. I had to, when I was looking for the pig. So I looked for Max, too. He can’t be at the Mortons’, or you would have heard him or seen him.’ Her lips twitched. ‘Probably both, knowing Max. So that means he’s gone down the coast path again. You know the cottages at Seawick End? There’s a woman in one of them, a widow. I think he goes to her. The bastard.’ She turned her head. ‘What about you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes. My wife’s in New York.’

  I paused. Sophia stared at me in silence.

  I said, ‘I haven’t seen her for six weeks.’ I didn’t add that her secondment to the firm’s New York office was by way of a trial separation for us; and, if the trial worked, that the separation might become permanent.

  ‘Do you miss her?’ Sophia said.

  I answered as honestly as I could. ‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Beth.’

  Sophia got up and, still draped in a blanket, looked at the kettle, which was obstinately refusing to boil.

  She turned and looked down at me. ‘It always takes ages when you watch it.’ She wrapped her arms around her body. She was still trembling.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ I said. ‘Shall I put more wood on the stove?’

  ‘It won’t help. Not until it’s hotter.’

  She went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle. There was a soft plop as she pulled out the cork.

  ‘I’m going to have some whisky. Do you want some?’

  ‘All right.’

  I watched her moving across to the table. She poured whisky into the teacups, left the bottle on the table and brought the cups to the sofa. The light from the lamp was so dim that I could barely make out her features until she sat down beside me.

  ‘There’s no soda. Do you want water?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ I would have liked ice, but I didn’t think there was much point in asking for it.

  She raised her cup. ‘Cheers,’ she said in a precise little voice.

  The first mouthful of the spirit stung my throat. The second brought warmth. The third, pleasure. Sophia said nothing. She just drank as if it were an unpleasant duty, like swallowing medicine. Then she got up again, fetched the bottle, refilled our cups and put the bottle on the floor beside the arm of the sofa.

  ‘Have you lived here long?’ I asked, just to break the silence.

  ‘Since April. Mr Morton lets us have it rent-free in return for some gardening. Oh, and looking after the pig. Not that I’ve done that very well this evening.’

  ‘But you’re not from here?’ I said.

  ‘No.’ She sipped her whisky but didn’t elaborate. ‘Max needs to be somewhere quiet for a while, and we haven’t got much money. He’s writing a book.’

  ‘Oh? What sort of a book?’

  Sophia shrugged. ‘Something about time. He’s a philosopher, you see. Whenever he tries to explain it to me, he gets cross. It’s because I’m stupid.’

  ‘You’re not stupid.’

  She gave a little snort of laughter. ‘You can’t say that. You don’t know me.’

  ‘I know enough to be sure you’re not stupid. Can I ask you something?’

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude. But – that mark on your cheek. What is it?’

  Her hand flew up to the place, shielding it from my eyes. ‘It’s a bruise.’

  Neither of us spoke. I watched her.

  ‘Max hit
me,’ she went on.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why? What can you do about it?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’m sorry he hit you.’

  Sophia drew her feet up and turned to sit facing me. One arm was around her knees. She held her teacup in the other hand. As she drank, her dark eyes studied me over the brim. They gleamed, for at this angle the light from the lamp was reflected in them.

  ‘He does it sometimes,’ she said, her voice detached, even bored; she might have been talking about someone who had nothing to do with her. ‘He gets angry.’

  ‘What about you? What do you do?’

  ‘You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’ She smiled to take the sting from the words. ‘Just living here takes up most of my time.’

  ‘No electricity?’

  ‘No. I don’t mind that, but it’s a bore to have to fetch our water from the Mortons’. They let us have baths, too, which is awfully kind. We have a very nice earth closet, though, round the back near the place where the pig lives. The only thing is, I worry about winter.’

  ‘You can’t stay here when it gets really cold. You’ll freeze.’

  ‘Why not? I’ve known worse. Much worse.’ She stretched her hand down towards the bottle. ‘Let’s have some more.’

  ‘I’d better not. I should leave you in peace.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’

  She leaned forward with the bottle and poured another inch of whisky into my cup. The trench coat fell open and I saw her long, pale neck rising from her nightdress, as elegant as a swan’s. The hand that held the bottle had chapped skin. Her nails were cut short and they looked grubby, like a boy’s, though the light was too uncertain for me to be sure. As she came a few inches nearer to me, she brought her smell with her: something dark and almost feral.

  ‘Drink,’ she said.

  Sophia was holding the bottle in her left hand. As she drew back, the sleeve of that arm slid down. I glimpsed the blur of a faded tattoo on her outer forearm.

  She didn’t refill her own cup. She put both it and the bottle on the floor. Then she said my name, twice, and stretched out her hands to me.

  Afterwards, I stumbled back to the Mortons’. The shingle was slipping and sliding on the beach. The battery of my torch died. The light from the Mortons’ torch was growing feeble so I switched it off.

  I looked back three times. I saw the light in Sophia’s window the first time, but not the second or third. She had bolted the door when I left.

  The trees at the end of the Mortons’ garden were swaying and rocking. It was raining hard again and my cheeks were wet. I thought about Max, warm and dry in the arms of the widow at Seawick End. I thought what a fool he was.

  When I’d left the cottage, I’d hugged Sophia. She kissed me. I said I’d come back in the morning.

  ‘No,’ she said and stroked my cheek.

  ‘Later, then. The afternoon.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ She stood back, her hand on the door, ready to close it. ‘I don’t want to see you again. Ever.’

  8

  I was up by seven, still with the smell of her on my skin. At eight, still unwashed, I went across the yard to the kitchen. Jane was there, laying the breakfast tray on the table. She asked me in a perfunctory way how I had slept. She said she usually had toast and muesli for breakfast and would that do for me?

  She wasn’t hostile exactly: she merely gave me the impression that I represented a responsibility that she, a busy woman, could have done without and should not have been required to undertake in the first place.

  ‘Mother won’t be down this morning,’ she said. ‘Had a bad night. Coffee or tea?’

  She left me at the table with my breakfast, while she took her mother’s tray upstairs, along with a neatly folded copy of the Daily Telegraph. She was gone nearly fifteen minutes. I had finished eating by the time she returned. There was a spot of colour on each of her cheeks.

  ‘I must be on my way,’ I said. ‘Leave you in peace.’

  ‘Yes.’ She poured herself a cup of coffee. ‘Your clothes and shoes are in the scullery. They’re pretty much dry by now.’

  I stood up. ‘I’ll go and change.’

  When I came back, wearing my own rather rumpled suit, I made a joke about at least not having had too much to pack. She received this with a stony face.

  I took out my wallet. ‘You must let me know what I owe you.’

  ‘Mother says there’s no charge.’

  ‘But I must pay you. After all, it’s a holiday let. Besides, I really don’t know what I—’

  ‘No charge,’ she repeated. For the first time she looked directly at me. ‘It’s her house. It’s up to her.’

  I asked her to pass on my thanks to Mrs Morton and said goodbye. Jane had already left the kitchen by the time I closed the back door.

  The storm had blown itself out, though there was a bank of clouds to the east that suggested another might be on the way. The rain had stopped. There were even shafts of sunlight in the distance, shining down like heavenly spotlights.

  I had the odd sensation as I walked down the Mortons’ garden that, since yesterday evening, I had been on holiday from my everyday life. Part of me didn’t want to go home.

  Sophia had told me not to come back. She had said that she didn’t want to see me again. But I couldn’t accept that. I had known from the moment I woke up that I would go to the cottage on my way back to the car. If Max were there, I would say I had lost my way. Or that I was curious about the ruins. But perhaps he would still be at Seawick End. And perhaps Sophia would change her mind about not seeing me again.

  I passed from the shelter of the Mortons’ trees into the field beyond. A stiff breeze was blowing off the sea. My trousers flapped around my legs. The suit material was thin. I felt the cold air on my skin. The ground was very wet and my black city shoes were soon unpleasantly damp.

  I glimpsed the jagged masonry along the top of the ruins. My heart behaved like a teenager’s and began to beat faster. But something wasn’t right. Twenty yards later, I stopped and stared.

  There weren’t three arches any more. There were only two. The cottage at the end had completely disappeared.

  For an instant I wondered if it could have been washed away during the night. But that was impossible. Anyway, since I’d last been there, what was left of the ruin had been fenced off from the field.

  I went up to the fence. It was made of chain mesh, with strands of rusting barbed wire along the top. Weeds, now dying, had grown tall on both sides of it. A faded sign told me to keep out and warned of danger.

  The only possible explanation was that I had hallucinated the whole experience: that both my visits to the cottage yesterday had never happened. Which meant, quite simply, that I was going mad.

  A little voice in my mind said: ‘Perhaps this is Mary’s revenge.’

  The cliffs on this part of the coast are friable, with a tendency to crumble into the North Sea. I walked to the end of the field and found a sort of natural ramp that led to the beach below. It was covered with banks of fine shingle, moulded by the waves into glistening ridges. I walked along it, slipping and sliding in my almost useless shoes, looking for traces of the cottage. I found nothing but strands of seaweed, fragments of wood, pieces of plastic – the debris washed up by the storm.

  The sea was choppy. The water was the colour of café au lait. The wind dug into it and sent flashes of spray that looked like white lace.

  Beyond the beach the coastline curved away in a shimmering arc towards a vast slab of a building. A nuclear power station. One of the celestial spotlights sparkled on its white dome.

  The car was where I had left it, parked on a verge up the lane. The battery was flat – I had completely forgotten that I had left the hazard lights on.

  Not that it mattered. In the daylight a cluster of roofs was clearly visible less than half a mile away across the heathland covered with blackening heather and stunted, winds
wept gorse. The roofs belonged to a small farm. The owner let me use her own mobile, which had a signal, to call the breakdown service.

  After that I had nothing to do but wait. The mechanic came within half an hour and did a temporary repair on the tyre and put a booster charge into the battery. I followed his van through the lanes to the A12. By lunchtime I’d had the puncture mended and I was driving south.

  I didn’t go to see my client near Ipswich in the end – I phoned and made some excuse. Instead I went home. It’s not like me to turn away work. I have the usual desperation of the self-employed that makes me take almost any job that is offered for fear that, if I turn one down, I shall never be offered another.

  But Sophia had changed that, at least for the time being. What had happened last night affected me on a physical level as much as an emotional or intellectual one. It was as if every particle of my body had been poured into a cup and stirred vigorously with a teaspoon. I don’t mean what we did on that huge, disintegrating sofa, though that was certainly stirring in another way, even in memory.

  The real problem – or rather the heart of disturbance – was this: I had spent about an hour inside a cottage yesterday evening which I now knew simply wasn’t there. The cottage didn’t exist. Therefore, nor did Sophia.

  So where did that leave me? Here or nowhere?

  9

  I heard the phone ringing inside as I was standing outside looking for my front-door key. Beth and I owned about a third of a small terraced house in Islington. The street was full of more or less identical houses. Many of the inhabitants had fairly interesting jobs in the media. They earned enough to shop at Waitrose and go skiing once or twice a year, but not enough to move to a house that wasn’t quite so cramped.

  The phone was still ringing when I got inside. I kicked the door shut, dropped the overnight bag I hadn’t used and ran down the hall to the kitchen. The phone stopped ringing just as I stretched out my hand to it.

  The caller didn’t leave a message. But I tried 1471 and I recognized the number. It was Mary and Alan’s.

  I called back at once. I knew that, if I didn’t, then I probably never would.