Swimming in the Shadows

by Diane Janes

  Somewhat intrigued, I experienced a childish guilty thrill when I turned the key and opened the top drawer, but my excitement was short-lived. The drawer contained an ancient bottle of ink and a large supply of unused blotting paper. My father had entertained a puritanical disapproval of the ballpoint, but surely he had not taken matters so far as to covertly stockpile his own writing necessities? The middle drawer proved an equally poor show – more stationery supplies – but in the bottom drawer I found a package of letters – not more than twenty of them, addressed to my father with just his name on each envelope, which meant that they must have been delivered by hand. In that moment I could almost hear my mother’s voice: ‘We didn’t bring you up to be the sort of person who reads other people’s letters.’

  Ignoring the voice and pulling out the contents of the first envelope, I scanned the top sheet. It was a love letter. I could barely believe it. My father, a man I had always thought cold and unsentimental, kept romantic letters from his courtship with my mother in the drawer of his desk.

  Fascinated, I carried the whole bundle out on to the semi-circular steps beneath the French windows, where I seated myself on the top step and read the first letter. It was fairly torrid stuff. Who would have imagined such goings-on nearly thirty years ago, with the permissive society not even a twinkle in Harold Macmillan’s eye? There was something faintly unbelievable about it all. My parents – Ted and Marjorie: they were not even romantic names.

  Then I reached the bottom of the second page and the shock made me go cold. The letter was signed Your loving Jean.

  I turned back to the beginning of the letter to check the date. Another shock. The letters had been written when I was a baby in arms. The realization that my father had been carrying on a passionate clandestine affair filled me with amazement, disbelief and ultimately sadness.

  Almost greedily, I read each letter in turn. The story was easy to piece together. Jean taught at the same school as my father. They left letters for one another in the staff pigeonholes. They met secretly when pretending to be elsewhere. As I read my way steadily through the bundle, I wondered when this impulsive, passionate man had turned into the person I had known? The letters spanned six months of his life. The final one was dated June, 1956.

  My dearest Ted,

  I dare not tell you how I feel as I write to you for the last time. I shall not keep our rendezvous on Thursday because if I see you alone, face-to-face, I know my heart will break. I have decided to accept the post in South Africa and I sail in a fortnight. You spoke of a choice. I cannot ask you to make a choice which will sacrifice your career, your wife and your daughter.

  Marjorie has made it clear that she will not divorce you, if you give me up.

  She had you first, my darling, for we met too late. We have had so little time, but I will always love you, always be yours.

  Jean

  Memories of my parents flooded back to me. The way their eyes never met; they never touched. The clipped little speech my father made at their silver wedding, describing my mother as his ‘companion and helpmate through the years’.

  The little brass key had unlocked more than just a desk drawer, for I believe it was the discovery of these letters which finally brought home to me how lives can be wasted. I had never thought of my parents as particularly happy people, but the discovery of the letters forced me to acknowledge the stark unhappiness of their lives: my father forever wishing himself having some other life with some other person, and my mother all the time aware of this. I never knew Jean, but the discovery of her letters crystallised the realization that I in turn was proceeding mechanically through a similar kind of life – a life bereft of real purpose, devoid of joy.

  I could not discuss these feelings with Alan. It would have been quite useless to attempt it. He had a way of smiling patiently while I talked, waiting for me to run out of breath or ideas before carefully dissecting everything I had said in a precise logical sequence, breaking it down, line by line, word by word, until it dissolved beneath his sensible, reasoned logic. His voice all the time quiet, measured, almost hypnotic. He would demonstrate beyond any doubt that we were happily married, had everything our hearts desired, could not possibly yearn for any other kind of life.

  Any suggestion that I might have contemplated a life beyond the cocoon of his protective attentions would certainly have provoked Alan’s amusement. ‘Oh, Jenny,’ he would have said, his very tone diminishing me to the status of an eternal child as he embarked on a recitation of my latest mishaps, before moving on to query how someone who could not overcome her completely irrational fear of our own cellar proposed to face the far grimmer realities of the outside world – alone.

  The letters from Jean had a cathartic effect. While I outwardly continued as normal, going to my job each day, cooking Alan’s dinner and sharing his bed each night, working my way through the clearance and disposal of the house in Orchard Lane, I also conceived a plan and set about its execution. I began by extracting modest sums of cash from the salary paid into our shared bank account. Initially I hid this money in the drawer of my father’s desk and, when that was no longer an option, I took my stash of notes home and stuffed it into the back of the drawer where we kept such rarely used items as dominoes and playing cards. I embarked on a lone shopping trip to purchase some new clothes, jeans, sweaters, shirts and trainers, placing them, unworn, among my existing wardrobe where they hung unnoticed. At the beginning it was like a kind of game – a private make-believe game from which, as no one else knew about it, I could withdraw at any time. I examined maps and timetables, like some dreamer who peruses glossy brochures and plans holidays to far-flung destinations, never actually expecting to go. It was a pleasurable distraction – something to take my mind off the awfulness of visiting my mother in the nursing home, a secret diversion which helped me through the shock of her death, the funeral, the paperwork, the miserable aftermath of it all.

  It was soon after the funeral that I bought a rucksack and an anorak. These were more difficult to conceal and eventually I decided to put them inside one of our big suitcases, which were kept in the smallest spare bedroom. If Alan had come across these articles they would have been impossible to explain, but we had no need of the big suitcases that spring so my acquisitions lay undisturbed. Finally I rang a bed and breakfast on the south coast and made a reservation in a false name. Even then there was nothing to say that I had to carry the thing through.

  EIGHT

  On Tuesday it was my turn to make dinner. Not that we took it strictly in turn, or even had a regular routine about where and when we spent time together. Our relationship was still that young. I was not expecting Rob until about seven p.m., so there was plenty of time to make a casserole. Once it was in the oven I sat at the table and tried to clear my head. Was the deception of getting married in Susan McCarthy’s name really any greater than my previous deceptions had been? Was I maybe even beating myself up unduly over Rob? To all intents and purposes there was no deception at all. He wanted to marry a woman called Susan, with whom he had fallen head over heels in love, and I was undoubtedly that woman. Lots of people must have little things in their past lives that they never disclosed to their spouses. Little things? Who was I trying to kid?

  Thoughts of past lives brought to mind the exercise book in the kitchen dresser, whose presence had been nagging at me for some time. It might so easily and innocently be found: Rob spent such a lot of time at the cottage now. On a sudden impulse I crossed the kitchen and extracted the book from the drawer. Throwing it away felt horribly like cutting down the safety net, yet keeping it posed an even greater risk. I stood, hesitating, with the slim volume in my hand. It was all in there – my new life. Silly, silly, I must not endow the book with a special status that it didn’t really have. It was only a cheap little exercise book of the kind sold in newsagents, and I knew the contents by heart.

  Just putting it into the dustbin didn’t seem right somehow. Or entirely safe. I reached
for a box of matches and went into the yard. It was dry and still this evening, with only the occasional bleating of sheep to disturb the general quiet. Darkness had swallowed up the surrounding landscape, but the small cobbled yard at the rear of the cottage was partially illuminated by the light from the kitchen window. My shadow stretched across this pale rectangle, huge and distorted, cut off at the shoulders where the light stopped abruptly before it reached the grass: a weird, headless monster crouching over its prey, jerking suddenly at the sound of each match rasping across the side of the box. The first couple of matches blew out, but the third one lasted long enough to ignite the uppermost corner of the flimsy book cover, which was made from paper barely thicker than the pages inside. It smouldered weakly for a moment or two, but I barely had time to straighten up before the flame died away. Using my body as a shield I lit a fourth match, and this time I suspended the exercise book by its covers, holding them between my finger and thumb so that the pages fell in an arc. The flame caught hold at the bottom and climbed up the ladder made by the pages. When the heat reached my hand I dropped the book on to the yard and at this the brighter flames withered, but the edges of the pages continued to glow, blackening towards the spine until the process faltered to a halt, leaving a mass of frilly, ash-edged ridges still secured by a pair of blackened staples. Although the little book was not totally destroyed, its contents had been obliterated forever.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit early for bonfire night?’ The voice and simultaneous scrunch of a boot made me scream. Rob was letting himself in at the back gate.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I was almost shouting. ‘You frightened the life out of me. How long have you been there?’

  ‘I only just got here.’

  ‘I didn’t hear the car.’ I started stamping on the charred remnants, my shadow jerking about the yard like a demented clog dancer.

  ‘I walked.’

  ‘Walked?’

  ‘Yes. I fancied a walk. I realized that if I went over High Plantation I could loop around Castle Rigg and take the footpath that comes out at the top of the lane. What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all. Come inside.’ I took his arm and all but dragged him into the kitchen.

  He stood on the step to take off his boots and padded across the floor in hiking socks, which made his feet look twice their normal size. ‘Something smells good.’

  ‘It’s chicken casserole,’ I said, latching on to a possible diversion. ‘I hope you’re hungry, because I’ve done loads of potatoes for mash.’

  There was no way I was going to get off the hook that easily.

  ‘So are you going to tell me?’ he asked in a playful tone.

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘What the sacrificial fire was all about.’

  ‘Oh … that …’

  ‘Letters from an old flame? A bit of witchcraft – burning my toenail clippings to retain your hold over me?’

  ‘If you must know, it was some silly poetry I wrote years ago. Schoolgirl stuff – really embarrassing.’ I knew it sounded lame. ‘Anyway, if you’re going to ask me about old flames, don’t forget I could start asking you the same questions.’

  Rob burst out laughing. ‘I’ve lived in the dale for the last five years. You don’t need to ask me. Any one of your staff would love to give you the complete lowdown – if they haven’t already.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Although I don’t doubt that they’d love to tittle-tattle.’ I seized on this as my cue to introduce the latest gossip-mongering from the Terrible Ts. ‘… The way they talk about Charles this and Di that – honestly, you’d think Maureen spent half her evenings having tête-à-têtes with the princess round at Kensington Palace.’

  Rob did not refer to the bonfire again until I drove him home. ‘Goodnight, my little pyromaniac,’ he said. He had already kissed me and was getting out of the car, so it was too dark for me to see his face. It was probably just a casual quip, but it flagged up a warning that he was still curious and unwilling to let the subject drop.

  We had developed a tacit understanding that we were not ready to move in together yet. This certainly wasn’t based on false Puritanism, but rather a desire to start out together in shared mutual territory, rather than under a roof which had initially belonged to one but not the other. For me this was yet another reminder of how different it had all been last time. I could remember my mother plainly. ‘What a lucky girl you are, Jennifer, to be going into a ready-made home. So many young couples have to scrimp and save to get a roof over their heads, but you will go straight into that lovely house …’

  At first I too had imagined myself fortunate. Alan’s tall Victorian house, with its original stained-glass lights in the bay window, the restored mosaic tiles in the hall: who wouldn’t have fallen in love with it? Alan’s collection of antique furniture, his books, his carefully chosen ceramics: didn’t these all mark him out as someone different, someone who had personality and taste, someone who stood apart from the common herd?

  Visitors were always invited to admire any new acquisitions – particularly the gallery of old photographs which, as their numbers increased, progressed slowly up the stairs. He picked them up in flea markets, dog-eared and unframed, and restored them to their former glory. Initially this was something I had enjoyed too. I even made up names for them: the handsome young soldier with sword and moustache was George Frederick, while the wedding couple next to him were Humphrey and Charlotte. I used to speculate on how they went on to have seven children and lived happily ever after. That was how it had been at the beginning, but later on the pictures all started to assume a haunting, melancholy presence. Perhaps in the end there were just too many of them – too many unsmiling strangers watching us from the walls of our hall. The little girls, all carefully posed with folded hands, their beautifully brushed hair secured in oversized ribbons, whose sad eyes seemed to follow me upstairs. I suppose it was just another symptom of my own general melancholia, but gradually I became convinced that they had all died miserably and young.

  Although I lived in Alan’s house for almost eight years, and he punctiliously transferred the title into our joint names and spoke of it as ‘ours’, I never really felt that it was. I raised the question of moving once, but Alan was adamantly against it, insisting that any ideas I had about selling up were solely connected with what he termed ‘your nerves’.

  Some people might have said the house was haunted, but I had accepted that the ‘ghosts’ were figments of my overwrought imagination, not least because Alan was never troubled by them. Not that there were ever any visible manifestations. It was auditory phenomena that troubled me. Spending the night there alone became such a big deal that Alan encouraged me to go and stay with my parents whenever he had to be away. In those days any unexplained tick in the central heating was enough to make me jumpy.

  One evening I remember in particular: it was the second winter after we were married and Alan was due home not much later than ten, so instead of retreating to stay with my mother, I was awaiting his return in the sitting room, filling in the time by listening to a discussion on the radio, when I thought I heard something beneath my feet. A sound too faint to be identified, followed by a subdued thud as if something had been knocked over. I instinctively looked down, but of course there was nothing to see except the carpet and the floorboards. I considered turning off the radio so that I could hear better, but then I dithered, because if there was someone down there, the sound of the radio might be useful in masking a call to the police. I stood up and took a step towards the phone, then hesitated. Was that another noise, or was I only imagining it?

  It was theoretically possible to enter the cellar from the garden because there were some padlocked wooden doors below the front window which opened on to a chute originally intended for deliveries of coal, and at some point a previous occupant had fixed a stepladder there to facilitate entry or egress. Anyone messing with the padlock would be out of sight of the
sitting-room window and well screened from the street by the laurel hedge which separated our plot from the pavement. I began to sidle towards the telephone, but then I stopped again. I had been wrong before and did not want to make a fool of myself.

  I stood listening for what seemed like several minutes until I was startled by the sound of the front door opening. I gave a little shriek, which brought Alan into the sitting room at once. When I explained the source of my anxiety I caught his fleeting smile before he pretended to take me seriously. Did I want him to go and check? He was already on his way to get the big torch. (There was but a single bulb in the cellar, and it did not penetrate the furthest recesses, where wine had once been stored.)

  He paused at the cellar door to say, ‘You know, I ought to make you come down with me, to satisfy you once and for all that there’s nothing there.’ The words were not spoken unkindly, but their threat menaced me. I had always entertained a quite ridiculous dread of the cellar. For a moment I imagined him taking me by the arm and forcing me to go down with him, but of course he attempted nothing of the kind.

  Alan was meticulous in his investigations, clumping down the wooden staircase and shining his torch into every nook and cranny, before going back out into the cold to check that the external hatch was still secured by its trusty padlock.

  During the few minutes it took him to accomplish all this, I dithered in the hall, presumably ready to make a bolt for it in the event that the Cellar Monster pursued my husband up the stairs. ‘I was going to ring the police,’ I told him, shamefaced, when he returned from the garden and secured the latch on the front door.

  ‘I’m so glad you didn’t.’ What did those words convey to me? Relief that I had not wasted their time, his time, my own time? Made an even bigger fool of myself than usual? The noises had seemed real to me and yet I knew that they could not have been.