The Forgotten Village

by Lorna Cook

  When the waitress had gone, Guy continued, ‘The presentation was good actually. Fascinating. Even for someone like me, who thinks they’ve heard it all before.’

  Melissa studied him while he spoke. His brown hair fell over his eyes and he pushed it back every few seconds. Melissa thought he was good-looking – in a posh boy kind of way.

  ‘I didn’t get to look at the schoolhouse though,’ he said. ‘I didn’t leave enough time. I think I might nip back tomorrow, just to satisfy idle curiosity. What did you think of the school? There’s meant to be some of the children’s work still on the walls, exercise books and coat pegs with their names on. It sounds rather moving.’

  ‘I didn’t see it either actually. I was rushing around quite quickly to get back for …’ Melissa trailed off. Why exactly had she been rushing around to get back for Liam? He hadn’t been bothered. It occurred to her now that he hadn’t even asked where she’d been all day.

  Guy waited for her to finish her sentence and when she didn’t, he asked, ‘Come with me tomorrow if you like? The photos in the church are wonderful too. A real eye-opener. You should see them before you finish your holiday.’

  What would she be doing tomorrow, waiting about for Liam to grace her with his presence after surfing? And she did want to take a better look around.

  ‘All right then, yes,’ Melissa said, ‘if you don’t mind me tagging along?’

  He beamed. ‘It would be a pleasure.’

  She looked at him and wondered how she’d got into this position. She was sat having dinner with a minor celebrity, albeit one she’d never heard of, who she’d only met a matter of hours ago and she was arranging to meet him again tomorrow.

  Melissa felt a stab of guilt about Liam and then tried to quash it immediately. Liam was making her feel, well, a bit crap actually and Guy Cameron was making her feel very at ease. They were only going to look at some photos. It was hardly a date.

  They ate their dinner and talked. Guy revealed he lived on the fringes of London where town just about met country and she confessed that she lived in a very unsexy part of town where London met Essex.

  ‘And what do you do, when you aren’t holidaying in Dorset?’ he asked while they waited for pudding.

  ‘I’m currently in between jobs,’ she said, trying not to sound too embarrassed. She didn’t really fancy telling him she’d jacked in her job in a fit of idealistic madness and was now temping.

  ‘Oh right?’ He was clearly waiting for more.

  ‘Just office work. Admin really. Nothing very exciting. How did you get into TV presenting?’ Melissa asked, attempting to move the conversation on quickly. She just couldn’t admit to this incredibly successful and rather good-looking man how much of a failure she was.

  The waitress brought their pudding over. They’d decided to share one of the restaurant’s famous soufflés. Guy didn’t have a sweet tooth, but he was happy to make the meal last a bit longer. He was enjoying Melissa’s company. It was the first time he’d been out with a woman in a long time.

  ‘I don’t know, really. I suppose I sort of fell into it. Someone suggested I’d be good on a radio segment and it all spiralled from there.’

  ‘I’ve got to confess that I’ve never actually watched any of your programmes,’ Melissa said, pushing her spoon into the soft, pillowy pudding and obviously avoiding his eye contact.

  He smiled. ‘Well, thank you for being honest.’ He was so used to people approaching him because he was in the public eye, believing they already knew him. It was refreshing talking to Melissa. She didn’t gush compliments at him.

  ‘And also, until I read your name on the leaflet this morning,’ Melissa continued, ‘I hadn’t actually heard of you either.’ He watched her spoon soufflé delicately into her mouth.

  He laughed now. ‘Believe it or not, that’s music to my ears.’

  ‘Really?’ she asked. ‘I did wonder if it was exhausting being a celebrity?’ Guy grimaced at the word celebrity and Melissa continued. ‘Whether you had to watch your back all the time in case someone papped you; whether you could go on a real bender in the pub without someone telling the Daily Mail?’

  ‘Ah, no one cares about a Z-lister like me,’ he said. ‘I get photographed a lot by lovely middle-aged women who just want a nice picture to show their friends. And I’m far too clean-cut to have anything I do end up in the gossip rags,’ he said with a wink.

  ‘Shame.’ She gave him a sideways smile. They looked at each other for a few seconds before she turned to signal the waitress for the bill. ‘I should be getting back.’

  ‘I’ll get this,’ Guy said. ‘I insist.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He nodded, pulling out his wallet.

  Melissa put her purse away with a reluctant look. ‘All right,’ she said slowly. ‘But you have to let me buy you lunch tomorrow then. Even if it’s only a plastic sandwich from a service station after we’ve been to Tyneham.’

  ‘It’s a deal.’

  Melissa stood to leave and he held out his hand to shake hers to seal the deal.

  She shook it with a smile. ‘Erm, 11 a.m. okay for you? At the main entrance?’

  ‘See you then,’ he said.

  She turned and gave him a little glance from the door. He waved goodbye and then sat down and cringed at himself when she was out of sight, pushing the rest of the pudding away. Who shakes hands after a nice dinner like that?

  He glanced around him. A few people had recognised him and were smiling as he caught their eye. He nodded to politely acknowledge them. One lady was taking a sneaky picture of him on her phone. Oh well, not giving Melissa a friendly kiss on the cheek had perhaps done him a favour.

  Melissa stood by the bookings desk for a few seconds, rifling in her bag for her car keys. The keeper of the bookings diary was off wielding her power over someone else and so Melissa did something she knew she was going to regret. She grabbed the diary and scanned through the list of names. She found what she was looking for in seconds and then put the book back before leaving the restaurant.

  As she walked to her car, she felt cold and it wasn’t due to the temperature. Liam’s name was in the book, listed against an earlier booking. Table for two.

  CHAPTER 3

  Melissa knew what she had to do. She and Liam needed to have ‘The Talk’.

  But the idea of speaking to him about it created a hollow feeling in her stomach. This kind of thing had never gone down well at home. As a child, she’d spent far too much time in her room listening to her parents fight, listening to her mother plead with her father over one thing or another. The muffled tones rarely gave away what the argument was about, but her mother’s crying at the end of almost every row had certainly been audible. But Melissa was stronger than her mother. She was sure of it. And at least there were no children hiding in an upstairs bedroom if a fight did break out between her and Liam.

  She stood in the shower the following morning, thinking for far too long, letting the hot water run over her. Melissa considered her track record with men. It wasn’t great. She knew that. Before Liam, six months had been her absolute personal best when it came to relationships. She knew it must be something she was doing. Or not doing. Perhaps that was a throwback to watching her parents kill their own relationship one fight at a time.

  Liam had been asleep by the time she’d got in last night and Melissa was secretly grateful that he’d already left to go surfing by the time she’d woken up this morning. Although whether they spoke about their issues, including Liam’s mystery restaurant booking, tonight or tomorrow, this delay was only putting off the inevitable. Things weren’t working and Melissa wanted to know why.

  She had hoped this holiday was going to fix whatever it was that had already gone so horribly wrong, but it was only highlighting that they really weren’t very compatible at all. Somehow, none of it seemed quite so horrific during the daily grind of working life when they only saw each other a few evenings a week.

  M
aybe that was the problem. Maybe he’d lost respect for her having jacked her job in. But she hadn’t been out of work for that long and she was on the hunt for something more suitable. It certainly didn’t help that Liam was silent a lot of the time these days and that Melissa did most of the talking, often to fill the silence. He’d never been a big chatter and his silent brooding was one of the things that Melissa had originally found attractive about him. But now his inability to actually talk about anything meaningful was doing neither of them any favours. She sighed and turned the shower off, knowing that when they did eventually speak, she couldn’t expect much from Liam. It would be her doing most of the talking anyway.

  The clock on the car radio showed 11 a.m. by the time Melissa was finally on her way through the country lanes, passing quaint traditional white fingerpost signs every few miles. In the distance, over the green hills littered with sheep, she could see the coastline and out to sea as she drove. The sun glinted off the water brightly. She was going full pelt in her hatchback, eager to keep the appointment she had agreed to. It felt like an old-fashioned sort of meeting; the kind people made before mobile phones and email meant you could casually cancel moments before and hope it would be okay. Why hadn’t she taken Guy’s mobile number? With her outrageous timekeeping, she wasn’t going to be there for at least another fifteen to twenty minutes. And that was assuming she didn’t get stuck behind a tractor.

  As her car eventually skidded to a halt in the car park, kicking up a bit of turf, Melissa could see Guy leaning against the gatepost. She smiled. He had waited.

  ‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ she said as Guy pointed to his watch and raised his eyebrows with a grin. ‘I couldn’t find my car keys and I thought my boyfriend might have moved them and then I almost forgot I promised to buy us some lunch. But it’s not from a service station. Oh no, it’s from a lovely little deli, so I think you’ll like it. But I don’t have a picnic mat, so we’ll have to just sit on the grass, which I don’t mind, if you don’t. And look,’ she said, presenting a huge bottle, ‘ta-da. I remembered to bring water today!’

  During her little speech, his face took on a confused expression, but Melissa couldn’t work out why. She lowered the water.

  ‘I really am sorry I’m late,’ she said again.

  He smiled thinly, but she still couldn’t read his expression; his eyes were hidden behind mirrored Ray-Bans, which meant Melissa could only see her own flustered reflection.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Melissa asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ His expression lifted. ‘I’m glad you’re here. Let me carry that.’ He reached out and took the water bottle and the bag of shopping from her hands.

  ‘Thanks.’ Melissa locked the car and they walked together into Tyneham. ‘I thought we could eat the picnic up by the Great House. I realise you didn’t get to see it yesterday. You were too busy escorting a dehydrated woman back down the hill.’

  He laughed. ‘True.’

  They walked on a few paces.

  ‘No golf buggy today?’ Melissa ventured.

  He looked sheepish. ‘Not today. God, I felt like a complete idiot yesterday, whizzing past everyone in that bloody buggy. I absolutely loathe things like that.’

  She looked at him through her sunglasses and they fell into a companionable silence.

  ‘So,’ he said after a while, ‘how long have you been with your boyfriend?’

  ‘How do you know I have a boyfriend?’

  ‘You just told me. He was one of the reasons you were late.’

  ‘Oh. Did I? About eight months.’ Melissa looked at Guy. Was it her imagination that Guy looked a bit annoyed?

  ‘Shall we look in the schoolhouse first?’ Guy asked, seemingly changing the subject.

  Melissa nodded, wondering why Liam’s existence might be bothering Guy. He didn’t think this was a date, did he? Of course he didn’t. She was being silly. He was a famous historian and she’d seen the way he had women practically falling at his feet.

  Guy opened the large wooden door to the schoolhouse and held it for her. If there hadn’t been a few tourists in front of her, Melissa could have sworn she’d been transported back in time. Everything inside the bright, airy room was cleanly scrubbed, but the original open-lid desks and chairs were still on the dark wood floor. Pieces were displayed around the walls: drawings of famous landmarks, old charts showing capital cities and times tables. It was all very atmospheric. The few tourists inside the room were whispering, out of a sort of respect.

  Melissa walked around, grateful that it wasn’t as busy in the village today as it was yesterday. She might have struggled to have actually seen any of the items inside the room otherwise. She thumbed through some of the textbooks on the shelves before stopping at the curved metal coat pegs on the far wall, still showing the names of the last of the children to attend the school before it had closed for requisition.

  ‘My gran came to this school.’ Guy stood beside her and looked at the coat pegs.

  ‘Really?’ Melissa raised her eyebrows. ‘Wow.’

  ‘It’s mad to think she sat at one of these desks and copied out tasks from that chalk board.’ He nodded to the front of the classroom.

  ‘How old was she when she left the village?’ Melissa turned to face him.

  ‘Seventeen. She was working up at the Great House by that point, so she’d long since left the school.’

  Guy moved off and Melissa flicked through a few of the children’s exercise books, trying to decipher the old-fashioned handwriting. She wondered why she’d never really bothered to explore museums and the kind of houses the National Trust owned before. Perhaps she’d never really known anyone who was interested enough to go with her, but now she was here, she was fascinated and enjoying herself.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Guy leaning back against the wall, fully engrossed in reading an old leather-bound encyclopedia. A few teenage girls arrived, clearly bored on a day out with their parents, and were making themselves busy, trying to catch his eye. Melissa smiled. Even if they had no idea who the man hidden behind the mirrored shades was, he was incredibly attractive. He looked up and gave them a quick smile before looking down at the book again. The girls giggled and nudged each other. Guy was completely oblivious.

  ‘Melissa, are you ready to go and look at Tyneham House?’ He put the book back on the shelf. ‘There’s not as much to see as in here, but it’s a sunny day and we can eat our picnic.’

  Melissa agreed, put the exercise book down and accompanied Guy out the door. She gave the girls a polite smile as she edged her way past them and tried not to laugh when they shot her daggers.

  ‘Those girls were eyeing you up,’ Melissa teased.

  Guy looked around blankly. ‘Which girls?’

  ‘Never mind.’ She laughed.

  ‘They probably thought I was someone else. People often assume I’m some A-lister when they think they recognise me, and then try hard to hide their disappointment when they realise “Oh, it’s just you off the telly.”’

  ‘Oh, I feel so bad for you.’ Melissa nudged his arm and Guy found himself laughing.

  They walked through the rest of the village in companionable silence. Now Guy wasn’t being driven around in a golf buggy with the organisers chatting to him non-stop, he could see the village properly, for what it was. A bloody mess. He had been waiting to see the village without quite realising it, for most of his adult life; ever since his grandmother had talked quietly about Tyneham years ago and her idyllic childhood there. As a historian, his specialist subject was World War Two and so he knew of the few villages up and down the country that had been taken over by the army during the war. Whole communities had been forcibly ejected. His grandmother had been part of one such community and now he was seeing where she’d grown up. He’d been amazed that she hadn’t wanted to come with him, see the village and walk, very literally, down memory lane. ‘It would be too painful,’ she had said. ‘Best not go back.’

  He and Melis
sa strolled past shells of pubs, farm labourers’ cottages, and what used to be shops. Guy sighed at what he saw and was grateful his grandmother hadn’t come along. She’d have hated this. Inside, he was reeling. He shook his head. This had been his grandmother’s village and now it was a ruin. Crumbling brickwork, boarded-up windows, great chunks of roofs missing, and the occasional Danger – No Entry sign. His grandmother had been stoic when discussing it. ‘It helped win us the war,’ she’d said. It was best she’d remember it how it was then and not how it looked now.

  By the time they reached Tyneham House, Guy was miserable. Melissa had been right when she’d said it was all just so depressing. It really was. He’d not felt like this yesterday. The schoolhouse was charming and it was clear the guides had made an effort in sprucing it up for visitors. But he was more interested in the house, which gave off an air of absolute abandonment, despite the fact it was one of the very few buildings in the village still intact.

  The village had been weeded and the grass cut, but the grounds of the Great House were in need of some love. They stood on a large patch of trampled grass in front of the manor. So this was it then. Tyneham House. He stood back to look at the once-great building. He noted the boarded-up doors and windows with their words of warning emblazoned across. For a reason he couldn’t quite pinpoint, he felt as if a heavy weight was on him.

  While his grandmother didn’t have especially fond memories, he’d found it enchanting to know she’d turned up for work here during the early war years before she’d had to leave Tyneham behind. In the village, he’d tried picking out her family home she’d described to him, but those that were still standing all looked the same. He couldn’t locate any individual property out of the identical ones from the long row into the village, towards the market square and back out towards the coast. He’d taken pictures in the hope she’d be able to spot her former home, but he was rather against showing them to her now. Her once lovely village home was in tatters.