by Ruth Ware
‘Hi,’ I said. He turned and smiled at me, and I saw that his eyes were almost golden, like a cat’s.
‘Guys, this is Luc Rochefort, my …’ She stopped, and she and Luc exchanged a glance, and a little smile that crinkled the tanned skin at the corner of his mouth. ‘My stepbrother, I guess? Well, anyway. Here we all are. Don’t just stand there, Luc.’
Luc smiled again, then he ducked his head, awkwardly, and moved backwards into the room, making space for the rest of us.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ he said as we filtered past, Fatima and I tongue-tied by the unexpected presence of a stranger, and a strange boy at that, when we’d been shut up for so many weeks with only other girls.
‘What have you got?’ I asked.
‘Wine,’ he said with a shrug, ‘Côtes du Rhône,’ and suddenly I knew what that accent was, what I should have realised from his name. Luc was French.
‘Wine is good,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’ And I took the glass he gave me and knocked it recklessly back.
It was late, and we were drunk and limp with alcohol and laughing and dancing to the records Kate had put on the turntable, when there was the sound of the door handle, and all our heads turned to see Ambrose coming through the door, his hat in his hand.
Fatima and I both froze, but Kate only stumbled across the room, tripping drunkenly over the rug and laughing as her father caught her and kissed her on both cheeks.
‘Daddy, you won’t tell, will you?’
‘Get me a drink,’ he said, throwing his hat on the table, and ruffling Luc’s hair, where he lay sprawled across the sofa, ‘And I never saw you.’
But he did, of course. And it’s his own sketch that gives him the lie, the little dashed-off pencil thing that hangs at the crook of the landing, outside Kate’s old bedroom. It’s a sketch of the sofa, that very first night, with Luc, and Thea and me tangled together like a litter of puppies, arms around one another, limbs entwined until it was hard to tell where my flesh ended and Thea or Luc’s began. Perched on the arm of the sofa is Fatima, her bare legs acting as a chair back for Thea to lean on. And at our feet is Kate, her spine against the battered couch, her knees to her chin, and her eyes on the fire. There is a glass of wine in her hand, and my fingers are laced in her hair.
It was the first night that we lay and drank and laughed, curled in one another’s arms, the stove flames warm on our faces, heating us through, along with the wine – but it was not the last. Again and again we would come back, across fields crunchy with hoar frost, or past meadows full of baby lambs, drawn again and again, like moths to a flame that shone through the darkness of the marshes, drawing us in. And then back through the pale spring dawns, to sit heavy-eyed in French, or wending our slow laughing way through the marshes on a summer morning, salt water dried into our hair.
We didn’t always break out. After the first two weeks of each term, the weekends were ‘open’, which meant that we were free to go home, or to friends, provided our parents gave permission. Home wasn’t an option for Fatima or me, with my father permanently with my mum at the hospital, and her parents away in Pakistan. And Thea … well, I never enquired about Thea, but it was plain that there was something very wrong, something that meant that she either could not or would not go back to her parents.
But there was nothing in the rules to say that we could not accompany Kate, and we did, most often packing up our bags and walking across the marshes with her on Friday nights after prep, returning Sunday night for registration.
At first it was the odd weekend … then it became many … and then at last most, until Ambrose’s studio was littered with sketches of the four of us, until the Mill was as familiar to me as the little room I shared with Fatima, more familiar even, until my feet knew the paths of the marsh by heart, almost as well as Kate.
‘Mr Atagon must be a saint,’ said Miss Weatherby, my housemistress, with a slightly thin smile, as I signed out yet again with Kate on a Friday night. ‘Teaching you girls all week, and then boarding you for free all weekend. Are you sure your father is OK with this, Kate?’
‘He’s fine,’ Kate said firmly. ‘He’s more than happy for me to have friends back.’
‘And my dad’s given permission,’ I put in. With alacrity, in fact – my father was so relieved that I was enjoying myself at Salten, not adding to his worries by clamouring to come home, that he would have signed a pact with the devil himself. A stack of pre-authorised exeat forms, by comparison, was nothing.
‘It’s not that I don’t want you to spend time with Kate,’ the housemistress said to me later, over tea in her office, concern in her gaze. ‘I’m very glad you’ve found friends. But remember, part of being a well-rounded young woman is having a wide variety of friends. Why not spend the weekend with one of the other girls? Or indeed stay here – it’s not as if the school is empty at weekends.’
‘So –’ I sipped my tea – ‘is there anything in the rules about the number of exeat weekends I can take?’
‘Well, nothing in the rules exactly …’
I nodded, and smiled, and drank her tea, and then signed out the following Friday to stay at Kate’s exactly as before.
And there was nothing the school could do.
Until they did.
BY THE TIME I reach the stretch of road leading into Salten village, I am hot and sweaty, and I pause under the shade of a clump of oaks by the road, feeling the sweat running down the hollow of my chest, pooling in my bra.
Freya is sleeping peacefully, her rosebud mouth just slightly open, and I stoop to kiss her, very gently, not wanting to wake her, before straightening up and pushing on, my feet a little sore now, towards the village.
I don’t turn at the sound of the car behind me, but it slows as it passes, the driver peering out, and I see who it is – Jerry Allen, the landlord of the Salten Arms, in the old flatbed truck that used to take drinks back and forth from the cash and carry. Only now it’s older and more ramshackle than ever, more rust than truck. Why is Jerry still driving a thirty-year-old rust bucket? The pub was never a gold mine, but it looks as if he has fallen on hard times.
Jerry himself is craning out of the window with frank curiosity, wondering, I expect, what kind of tourist is mad enough to be walking along the main road, alone, in the heat of the day.
He’s almost past me when his face changes, and he gives a little blast of the horn that makes me jump, and grinds to a halt on the verge, throwing up a cloud of dust that sets me coughing and choking.
‘I know you,’ he says as I draw level with the truck, its engine still running. There is a touch of sly triumph in his voice, as though he has caught me out. I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that I never tried to deny it. ‘You’re one of that crowd used to hang around with Kate Atagon – one of them girls her pa—’
Too late he realises where this conversation is leading and he clears his throat, and covers his mouth, trying to hide his confusion in a fit of smoker’s hack.
‘Yes,’ I say. I keep my voice even, refusing to let him see me react to his words. ‘I’m Isa. Isa Wilde. Hello Jerry.’
‘All growed up,’ he says, his eyes watering a little as his gaze travels over my figure. ‘And a baby, no less!’
‘Little girl,’ I say. ‘Freya.’
‘Well, well, well,’ he says meaninglessly, and he gives a gummy smile, that shows his missing teeth, and the gold tooth that always gave me a slight shudder for reasons I could never pin down. He regards me silently for a moment, taking me in from my dusty sandals to the sweat patches staining my sundress, then he jerks his head back towards the Reach. ‘Terrible news, isn’t it? They’ve fenced off half the bank, Mick White says, though you can’t see it from here. Police teams, sniffer dogs, them white tent things … though what good they think that’ll do now, I don’t know. Whatever’s buried there, it’s been out there in the wind and rain long enough, from what Judy Wallace’s old man said. Her it was that found it, and to hear Mick’s account, their
dog snapped it right in half at the elbow, brittle as a stick. Between that and the salt, I don’t suppose there’s much left of it now.’
I don’t know what to say to this. A kind of sickness is rising in my throat, so I just nod, queasily, and something seems to strike him.
‘You going to the village? Hop in, and I’ll give you a lift.’
I look at him, at his red face, at the rickety old truck with the bench seat and no belts, let alone a child seat for Freya, and I remember the way you could always smell whiskey on his breath, even at lunchtime.
‘Thanks,’ I say, trying to smile. ‘But honestly, I’m enjoying the walk.’
‘Don’t be soft.’ He jerks a thumb at the back of the truck. ‘Plenty of room in there for the pram, and it’s a good mile still to the village. You’ll be roasted!’
I can’t smell whiskey, I’m too far away from the truck for that, but I smile again and shake my head.
‘Honestly, thanks, Jerry. But I’m fine, I’d rather walk.’
‘Suit yourself,’ he says with a grin, his gold tooth flashing, and puts the truck back into gear. ‘Come into the pub when you’re finished with your shopping, and have a cold one on the house, at least.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, but the word is drowned in the roar of tyres on grit and the cloud of summer dust as he pulls away, and I wipe the hair out of my eyes, and continue on down the road to the village.
Salten Village has always given me the creeps a little, in a way I can’t explain. It’s partly the nets. Salten is a fishing village, or was. It’s really only pleasure boats that go out of the port now, although there are a handful of commercial fishing boats that still use the harbour. In tribute to this, the houses in the village are festooned with nets, a decorative celebration of the town’s history, I suppose. Some people say it’s for luck, and perhaps that’s how it started out, but now it’s kept up purely for the tourists, as far as I can see.
The day trippers who pass through on their way to the sandy beaches up the coast go wild for the nets, taking photographs of the pretty little stone and half-timbered houses swathed in the webbing, as their kids buy ice creams and gaudy plastic buckets. Some of the nets look pristine, as if they were bought straight from the chandler and have never seen the sea, but others have plainly been used, with the rips that put them out of service still visible, chunks of weed and buoys knotted in the strands.
I have never liked them, not from the first moment I saw them. They’re somehow sad and predatory at the same time, like giant cobwebs, slowly engulfing the little houses. It gives the whole place a melancholy air, like those sultry southern American towns, where the Spanish moss hangs thick from the trees, swaying in the wind.
Some houses have just a modest skein of netting between the storeys, but others are festooned, with great rotting swags that drape from one side to the other, hoicked up above doorways, obscuring windows, tangling in pot plants and window latches and shutters.
I can’t bear the idea – of opening your window late at night, and feeling the cloying netting pushing back against the glass, shutting out the light, feeling it tangle in your fingers as you force the window open, the rip of the strands as you try to free the latch.
If it were me, I would sweep away every vestige of the sad relics, like someone spring-cleaning a room, chasing out the spiders.
Perhaps it’s the symbolism I don’t like. Because what are nets for, after all, but to catch things?
As I walk down the narrow high street now, they seem to have grown and spread, even as the place itself seems to have become shabbier and smaller. Every house is swathed, where ten years ago it was maybe half, if that, and the nets look to me as if they have been arranged deliberately to cover up the way that Salten is fading – draped over peeling paintwork and rotting wood. There are empty shops too, faded ‘For Sale’ signs swinging in the breeze, and a general air of dilapidation that shocks me. Salten was never smart, the divide between town and school always sharp. But now it looks like many of the tourists have disappeared to France and Spain, and I am dismayed to see that the shop on the corner that sold ice cream and was always bright with plastic buckets and spades is gone, its empty window full of dust and cobwebs.
The post office is still there, though the net above its entrance is new: a broad orange swag, with an old repaired tear still visible.
I look up as I push the door open with my back, reversing the pram into the tiny shop. Don’t drop on me, I’m praying. In my mind’s eye the tangling threads are engulfing me and Freya in their suffocating web.
The bell dings loudly as I go in, but there’s no one behind the counter, and no one comes as I walk to the ATM in the corner, where the pick-and-mix boxes used to be. I have no intention of taking Kate’s money, but the £100 I gave to her nearly cleaned me out, and I want to be sure I have enough in my wallet to …
I pause. To what? It’s a question I don’t quite want to answer. To get groceries? To pay Kate back for the tickets to the alumnae ball? Both of those, certainly, but they are not the real reason. Enough to get away in a hurry, if I have to.
I’m tapping in my PIN, when a voice comes from behind me, a deep raspy voice, almost like a man’s, although I know it’s not, even before I turn round.
‘Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.’
I take the money from the machine’s mouth, and pocket my card, then turn, and there behind the counter is Mary Wren – village matriarch, perhaps the nearest thing that Salten has to a community leader. She worked in the post office when I was at school, but now, for some reason, her appearance wrong-foots me. I had assumed that in the years since I left Salten she would have retired, or moved on. Apparently not.
‘Mary,’ I say, forcing myself to smile as I shove my purse back in my bag. ‘You haven’t changed!’
It’s both true and untrue – her face is still the same broad, weather-beaten slab, still the same small dark penetrating eyes. But her hair, which used to be a long dark river to her waist, is iron grey now. She has plaited it, the thick grey rope dwindling down into a meagre, curling end barely thick enough to hold an elastic band.
‘Isa Wilde.’ She comes out from behind the counter and stands, hands on hips, just as massive and immovable as ever, like a standing stone. ‘As I live and breathe. What brings you back?’
For a minute I hesitate, my eyes going to a pile of local weekly papers, where HUMAN BONE FOUND IN REACH still blares forth.
Then I remember Kate’s lie to the taxi driver.
‘We – I – it’s the summer ball,’ I manage. ‘At Salten House.’
‘Well.’ She looks me up and down, taking in my linen sundress, sticky and limp with sweat, Freya slumbering in her Bugaboo. ‘I must say, I’m surprised. I didn’t think as you came back here any more. Plenty of dinners and balls been and gone and no sign of you and your little clique.’
She pronounces it click and for a minute I can’t work out what she’s saying, but then I understand. Clique. It’s a loaded word, and yet I can’t deny it. We were cliquey, Kate, Thea, Fatima and I. We were pleased with ourselves, and we had no need for others except as targets for our jokes and games. We thought we could take on anything, anyone, as long as we had each other. We were arrogant and unthinking, and that’s the truth of it. My behaviour back then is not something I’m proud of, and I don’t enjoy Mary’s pointed reminders, though I can’t fault the justice of her choice of words.
‘You see Kate though, right?’ I say lightly, trying to change the conversation. Mary nods.
‘Oh, of course. We’re the only cash machine in the village, so she’s in here pretty regular. And she stuck around, when there’s plenty wouldn’t have. People respect that, in spite of her little ways.’
‘Her ways?’ I echo back, unable to stop a slight acerbity entering my voice. Mary laughs easily, her big frame shaking, but there’s something mirthless about the sound.
‘You know Kate,’ she says at last. ‘She keeps herself to
herself, living out there like she does. Ambrose was never a loner like that, he was always in the village, down the pub, playing his fiddle in the band. He might have lived out on the Reach, but he was one of us, no mistake about it. But Kate … .’ She looks me up and down, and then repeats, ‘She keeps herself to herself.’
I swallow, and try to think of some way to change the subject.
‘I hear Mark’s a policeman now, is that right?’
‘Yes,’ Mary says. ‘And very convenient it is too, to have someone living local, as you might say. He works out of Hampton’s Lee, but this being his home patch, he comes through here more regular than an outsider might.’
‘Does he still live with you?’
‘Oh yes, you know what it’s like round here with the second-home owners pushing the prices up, very hard for young people to save for their own place now, when there’s rich people from London coming down, snapping up the cottages.’
She eyes me again, and this time I feel her eyes lingering on the expensive change bag, and my big Marni tote, a present from Owen that can’t have been less than £500 and was probably much more.
‘It must be hard,’ I say awkwardly. ‘But I guess at least they bring in money?’
Mary snorts derisively.
‘Not them. They bring their food down in the back of their cars from London, you don’t see them in the shops round here. Baldock’s the Butcher closed, did you see that?’
I nod mutely, feeling an obscure sense of guilt and Mary shakes her head.
‘And Croft & Sons, the bakers. There’s precious little left now, part from the post office and the pub. And that won’t be round for long if the brewery get their way. It don’t make enough money, you see. It’ll be converted into flats before this time next year. God knows what Jerry’ll do then. No pension, no savings …’
She moves closer, and tips back the hood of Freya’s pram.
‘So you’ve got a daughter now?’
‘That’s right.’ I watch as her strong, thick finger traces a line down my sleeping baby’s cheek. There are dark red stains under her nails and in the cuticles. It’s probably ink from the post-office stamp pads, but I can’t help thinking of blood. I try not to flinch. ‘Freya.’
