The handwriting, he could only assume, was that of Diane Jackson.
Damn, he'd thought.
Diane always tried to keep her weekends for spending with Jed, but because of the rain they had to spend the early part of the day in their own below stairs lounge, watching the Saturday morning cartoons on television. She'd hoped to be able to take him out, perhaps for a longish walk through the forest where they could hope for a glimpse of a deer, but at its heaviest the downpour would have called for wetsuits rather than waterproofs. And he seemed happy enough.
Jed was coming up to five years old, very bright but also very quiet… so quiet that she worried sometimes, wondering if there were things wrong that he wasn't telling her. He was small for his age, dark, large eyed — in fact he seemed to be all Diane and almost nothing of his father. About twice a day, she'd ask herself whether this move had been right for him. Jed had watched his parents' marriage break up and had never said a word; he was hardly likely to start making his feelings known now.
So she watched him closely, and she tried to read the signs, and when he seemed to be wanting something special she did her best to see that he got it. Jed's idea of doing something special was to be allowed to help her out on the estate, almost as if he was afraid that he'd find himself abandoned if he didn't make himself useful. Diane told herself that this was just a kind of paranoia on her part, an over apprehension that came from reading too many doctor articles in women's magazines, but it didn't make her any less uneasy.
But what could she expect? She'd taken him from the town and the friends that he knew and she'd brought him to this great, dusty mausoleum of a place where he didn't even like to run around because the echo of his footsteps sounded too much like someone faceless who was following too close. He spent two thirds of his day at a school ten miles away, and the rest of the afternoon looking through the older children's comics at Mrs Neary's until Diane picked him up at five. Aimless and with no company, what kind of a life was that?
Too much like her own, she was beginning to suspect.
By negotiation when the rain had stopped, the proposed deer spotting walk became a combined walk and trap shoot. Jed liked to pull the level which fired the clays into the air while Diane would blast away and try to improve her shooting. It took him both hands and all his weight, but at least it was exercise. They loaded the launcher and a box of black clays into the back of the Toyota, and drove up an old gated track to the little used range.
The range was a clearing in the forest with some open sky beyond, along with a couple of huts and an open frame for the would be marksman to stand. They brought out the launcher and fastened it to its base, and Diane spread out some plastic sheet for Jed and weighted it with the box of clays. She'd wrapped him up so well against the weather that he could hardly be seen in the middle of all his clothing. Around them was the silence of the dense conifer wood, a moment of stillness held forever in time while the rest of the world moved on outside.
Jed did everything by the book, sounding the warning horn before every pull and staying well clear of Diane and the gun. The launched clays zipped across the window of sky, and Diane followed each with a two foot lead before squeezing the trigger.
And then, if everything ran true to form, the undamaged clays would sail down to a landing somewhere out of sight.
Diane scored five hits out of twenty, which was the limit that she'd set herself because of the cost of the cartridges. Afterwards they went scouting for clays that could be re used; some cracked on landing, but others had come down whole. Diane carried the box, and Jed filled it. The trees around them stood tall and straight, like a phantom army. The ground sloped, strewn with fine moss and bark so soft and spongy that their footprints took minutes to disappear. The earth had been churned up black where forestry vehicles had passed through during the week, and there were cut and trimmed logs waiting for collection alongside the track.
"It's raining again," Jed said, looking up at the sky.
"Must be coming our way," Diane said. "We'd better hurry."
The rain put an end to their chances of a walk not that they'd have been likely to spot a deer anyway, after the noise made by the horn and the gun. They drove back to the hall, and Diane grilled a beefburger for Jed and put it on a bun. He insisted on tackling it with a knife and fork. Diane sat on the opposite side of the refectory table and watching him, chin in hand, as someone with nothing better to do might watch somebody mending a clock.
"You might as well pick it up," Diane said at last. "You're getting it everywhere."
"No," Jed said, with some determination as he attacked the bun from the other side.
"It's allowed, picking a beefburger up."
"No."
There was silence for a while as Jed ploughed on. And then Diane said, "So how's the school?"
"All right."
"Only all right?"
"The games are all strange. Everybody keeps touching everybody." He made a yuck face, and then carried on.
Diane gave a slight, wry smile, and looked at the rain on the window.
It was still raining steadily when she'd put him to bed, after a last half hour of television and a couple of chapters of Stig of the Dump. She stood at the beaded glass and looked out into the gathering darkness.
And, without really meaning to, she found herself wondering what Pete McCarthy might be doing.
Probably having big fun with that Russian waitress.
Damn, she thought.
SIXTEEN
He was in the bathroom that night when he heard her go. He was waiting for a couple of soluble aspirin to break up in a glass of water as he stood before the opened mirror cabinet. He looked up sharply at the sound of the door — Again? he thought disbelievingly, and he winced as the movement aggravated the mild headache that he'd brought home with him.
He listened for a while, and the silence of the house told him yes, again. Still carrying the glass, he went out into the hallway.
This time she'd closed the door behind her. He opened it, and looked out. She'd gone. Tonight there was a moon, starlight even, and he knew that after a few minutes away from the house it would be possible for her to see with surprising clarity; but moon or no moon, it seemed to make little difference to her and she'd been spending hours abroad at even the deepest, darkest point in the cycle.
This was the part that troubled him, that he found difficult to understand. He could remember how, after moving out here and having been a city dweller all of his life, he'd come to realise that he'd never known what true darkness was; even away from houses and street lighting there had always been a faint, reflected amber cast to the sky, but here there was nothing. He could remember the first time that he'd stepped outside into country darkness and closed the door behind him; it was as if he'd been struck blind with the click of the latch, and he'd begun to panic at his inability even to tell which way was up.
Alina said she'd been raised in the country. Maybe that was it, you grew up with a knack that you otherwise couldn't acquire, like the owls and the bats and the creatures of the lake. She had it, he didn't. Could it be that what he was feeling was a kind of envy, in the sense that he'd brought her here, to a place that he felt he'd made his own, and in a matter of weeks she'd already grown closer to it than he could ever hope to be?
No, he tried to tell himself, that wasn't it; nothing so mean, nothing so unreasonable. Even though he was looking forward to the day when she moved on, he was already beginning to sense that her leaving would be something of a wrench. As they'd agreed, there was nothing between them… but he knew that he'd miss her.
Without even realising that he'd moved, he found himself standing by the door to her room.
He put his hand on the handle.
Hesitated a while longer.
Took a sip of the aspirin.
And then, with a guilty look over his shoulder, he opened her door and stepped inside.
She kept the room neat, her bed made and her
work clothes carefully preserved on a hanger on the front of the wardrobe. Her party dress was alongside, bagged in polythene to protect it from dust. Over on the dressing table, one of her notebooks lay alongside the photograph album. He went across to it, still thinking that it wasn't too late to back out and close the door behind him and pretend that he'd never even been in here.
But instead, he opened the book of photographs.
The pictures were strange. Not all of them, but some. A number were of the same place, some old village with nobody in it, the first a shot down a dusty road and the rest of individual buildings or, in some cases, of open fields enclosed by split rail fencing. The houses were all of dilapidated wood, with the tallest building a spired church right in the middle of everything. Fir trees grew in amongst the roofs, and weeds and flowers grew everywhere else. The village stood next to a lake.
A fast flick through some of the other pages showed images of a more easily recognisable kind — strange faces, old friends, scenes from a life. He closed the album carefully, making sure that none of the loosened pages could fall out and give him away.
Then, quietly, he left the room.
SEVENTEEN
It was midway through a Friday afternoon, and Adele Venetz had taken the restaurant's van to the cash and carry for all the last minute supplies they'd be needing for Saturday's party catering job, leaving her sister and Alina to manage the business alone. It was quite a drive and quite a list for when she got there, so she was unlikely to be back before the early evening; but this was no great problem, because they'd soon be closing the doors so that they could make a start on the next day's preparations. It had been a quiet afternoon so far, and it showed no signs of picking up. A few day trippers and walkers had stopped by, but almost no locals at all.
When the outside deck stood empty and all the tables had been cleared and reset and there still wasn't a prospect of any trade in sight, Angelica said to Alina, "Come on, let's take a break," and they headed into the kitchen.
Alina mostly took her breaks alone; she'd sit in a corner with a magazine, usually one of Adele's old wildlife partworks, and be about as obtrusive as a church mouse until her time was over. At which point she'd stand, lay the magazine aside, and get straight back to business. When they did converse, she said little and mostly listened; it had only recently struck Angelica that she knew almost nothing more about Alina now than she had at the end of that first day.
And, as for the reason why it had stuck her…
"I had to make a guess this morning," she told Alina, glancing back over her shoulder from the Cona machine as she waited for the water to run down through the filter. "I hope I guessed right."
"What do you mean?" Alina said, warily. She'd moved over by the window and had been reaching for a chair, but now she stopped. She wasn't sure where Angelica was leading, and so Angelica went straight to it.
"Whenever we employ somebody, there are formalities we have to go through. Tax. National Insurance. It can get complicated."
"I'm sure it can."
"Especially," Angelica said, "when you're trying to make out a form for somebody whom you know won't appear anywhere in the records."
She glanced over her shoulder again.
Slowly, Alina closed her eyes. Her face was as blank as a porcelain mask. She lowered her head, as if to look at the floor.
Angelica went on, "I'm right, aren't I?"
Alina nodded.
"Want to tell me about it?"
"Sing for my supper," Alina said with a kind of bitter weariness that ran completely against Angelica's perception of her character. It stung her to a sharp reply.
"Nothing of the kind," she said, the coffee forgotten as she turned to face her. "It's just possible that I may be able to help you."
Still guarded, as if the real centre of her personality stood behind glass and in silence, Alina said, "What do you want to know?"
"You might start by trusting me. I think I've earned it. Begin at the beginning."
Alina looked at her for a while. It was as if she was deciding. And then she shrugged. What had she got to lose, she seemed to be saying, now that it had come to this?
She folded her arms, and leaned back to rest against the work surface behind her. "I was never a waitress before I came here," she said. Her gaze was level, a challenge to disbelief. "I've told you that already."
"I know, you've learned fast. What were you before?"
"I was a schoolteacher. This was at the language school in Leningrad, with all the lessons in English. It was a good job, a very good job, but I lost it."
"How?"
"I never knew. It was one of those mad things where you don't know if you've done something wrong and no one will ever tell you. What happened was, one of my students wrote something in an examination essay and it got me fired. I never found out what. I never got a chance to defend myself and I wouldn't have known the right thing to say if I had. I couldn't get another job. After a while I started to get official letters threatening to send me to prison if I didn't find work. I lost my flat, and I had to move in with friends. I was living off my car savings for a while, but then they ran out. For a while I was sleeping on a floor… I'd never had to live like that before. I finally got one job offer, but when I turned up to work I found that it had been a mistake. I'm pretty sure that someone had called them."
This was worse than anything Angelica had expected. She said, "Is that why you decided to get out?"
"That, and other reasons." Alina looked down. "I'd had some old trouble. They were threatening to bring that up, too. I couldn't face it. So I decided to leave. But the first try was a shambles, and I was caught."
"They took you back?"
"Worse. I was examined by three doctors and declared insane. They did that kind of thing, back then. They put me in the prison hospital. I was there for nearly six months and by the end of the first week, I wanted to die. Sometimes I thought I was going to; sometimes I was even more scared at the thought that I wouldn't. They interfered with me there. I don't even like to think about it."
Angelica now knew why Alina had disappeared from the terrace so promptly on the day that Walter Hardy had hooked out the dead dog. It wasn't the sight of the dog itself that had driven her indoors, but the certainty that the police would soon be arriving. Seeing that Alina was upset by the memory, she said, "You don't have to go on," but now Alina was determined to be heard.
"Now you know I've no right to be here," she said, "I want you to know what's waiting for me if ever I get taken back. I only got out of the hospital because of an old unclosed file, and a doctor from the outside who took an interest in my case. They didn't officially let me out — I escaped. Otherwise, I'd still be there. And that's the reason why they want to get me back."
"And how did you reach England?"
"By using somebody," she said, and her voice sounded hollow with guilt.
Angelica, the coffee now standing cold and forgotten in the jug beside her, said, "Go to the authorities, Alina. They wouldn't send you home, not with a story like that."
"You can guarantee it?" If Alina was looking cynical, Angelica could only suppose that it was because she'd earned the right to be. "I don't think that you can. According to the record, I'm a criminal and wherever I am, I'm there illegally. If the authorities get hold of me, it won't matter what I say — I'll be returned, and then I'll be lost."
"But you can't just hide forever."
"I have plans. Please don't worry about me. I don't intend to leave this valley."
There was a determination in her eyes now that was almost frightening; how little Angelica had understood, she now realised, reading only the surface and never suspecting that any of this lay beneath.
Alina added by way of explanation, "Everyone needs to belong somewhere. And this is the place that I've chosen."
"Well," Angelica said, "I want you to remember that you've got friends here. If you should need any help…"
"When the
day comes, I'll ask," Alina said. And then she glanced out of the main kitchen window, the one that had a partial view of the terrace; Angelica looked as well, and saw that they had a few customers arriving and looking around uncertainly at the unstaffed deck.
Alina said, "Do I still have a job?"
"Of course you do."
Angelica had already decided that her money could be taken out of the petty cash and then lost in the books somewhere… and if ever they should be caught doing it, she didn't feel that it was a crime she'd be ashamed of.
Alina smiled, with some confidence but also a lot of apprehension still, and she moved around the table toward the door. She took her notepad from the pocket of her apron as she went, and at the doorway she stopped for a moment as if to gather herself.
She took a breath and, in the space of a couple of seconds, seemed to re invent the waitress from the refugee. It was a faintly unsettling transformation for Angelica to witness, an unasked for revelation of a totally private process. One shell was discarded and a new one immediately hardened into its place, but for the brief instant in between there was a glimpse… of what?
Angelica couldn't have said. She reckoned that she could only take on board a limited number of surprises in any given period, and her quota for the year had just been reached. She already had plenty to think about.
Alina, meanwhile, went on out into the daylight.
EIGHTEEN
Midway through Friday afternoon, the early shift newsreader watched the red transmission light die on her last bulletin of the day and sat back from the microphone with a sigh of relief. That was it until handover on Monday, which she hoped would be enough time to shake off the cold that had been dogging her for the last couple of days.
Her name was Isobel Terry, and she was twenty two years old. She'd been in commercial radio for eleven months following nearly three years on a regional newspaper; she reckoned to stick around this particular station for another two years at the most. After that she reckoned that if she hadn't moved on to somewhere bigger, she'd probably be stuck here forever reading out the latest sheep prices at six o'clock every morning. Isobel was ambitious, and had her sights set on the national news media; unfortunately, so did every other young news hustler in every backwater station in the country, and few of them were having to contend with sinuses that felt as if they'd been stuffed with pillows. God only knew what she sounded like on the air. Inside her cans, she sounded like Elmer Fudd.
The Boat House Page 9
