During her first shift Ann was concentrating on taking the right food to the right tables and not spilling anything on anyone. She didn’t notice the dark-haired barman watching her every hesitant move. But as her confidence grew she felt the eyes following her, from the kitchen to the tables and back again, and towards the end of the night she met the eyes confidently. She had to look away quickly, worried she would laugh. Conner Ryan was twenty and beautiful. Ann had seen men like him in adverts, selling aftershave or modelling watches with a haunted stare, but this man was only five feet away and working behind a bar in Maltham. She looked again, to make sure, and when he smiled at her, she spluttered, and said, ‘God, sorry,’ and rushed back to the kitchen, hoping to hide until she regained her composure.
They had only been out once when Conner turned up at the house late on a Thursday night. George Stead stumbled down the stairs and opened the door, his dressing gown thrown hastily over his pyjamas.
‘Is Ann about?’ Conner had asked, sweeping back his helmet-squashed hair with his hand.
‘About? It’s half past eleven on a Thursday night and she’s sixteen. She’s in bed. Asleep.’
Conner smiled at Ann’s dad, nodded behind him and said, ‘A sleepwalker, is she?’
Ann hadn’t been asleep, she’d heard the motorbike approach and would have answered the front door long before her dad if she hadn’t been wearing ancient pink pyjamas, dotted with white petal heads. She’d hurriedly changed into jeans and a top and rushed down the stairs, mortified to find her dad, who looked older than she’d ever seen him look; his hair ruffled by sleep, a confused expression on his face, holding his arm across the doorframe as if Conner was threatening an assault on the house.
‘Ann?’ he said, when she arrived at his side.
‘It’s a friend from work, Dad. We’ll just be five minutes. I promise.’
Her dad looked from Conner to Ann and back to Conner. ‘Five minutes,’ he said, tapping his naked wrist and slowly mounting the foot of the stairs, glancing back distrustfully at the handsome young man at his front door. Ann felt the relief of waking from a falling dream when he finally turned the corner onto the landing and disappeared from sight. She stepped out of the front door and hissed at Conner, ‘What are you doing here?’
Conner dragged her to him and kissed her. Ann returned the kiss and then pulled away, slapping Conner’s arm before letting her body fall back into his arms. It was thrilling to be held by him.
‘I wanted to see you,’ he said, holding her tightly, pushing his hands into the small of her back as if trying to meld her into him. They kissed again and held each other. Ann was sure that nobody in Maltham had ever felt how she felt just then. Certainly not her parents, or any of her parents’ friends. And not any of her own friends. How could they have? She knew these people – how could they have felt like this and still look and act the way they did?
Conner was facing the house. ‘So this is the Stead mansion,’ he said.
‘It’s hardly a mansion.’ Ann sounded more defensive than she meant to.
‘It’s a mansion where I come from.’ Conner ran his hands deeply through Ann’s hair, starting at the roots and finishing at the freshly cut tips, then he kissed her gently on the neck, climbed onto his motorbike and roared away, messing up the gravel drive as he tore off. Ann waved him away and listened to the high rip of the engine gradually fade until all that was left was the silence of late-night Maltham. Ann was electrified – all her summer boredom was gone. Even the stale house behind her seemed full of possibilities, the familiar garden in front of her, where a couple of years before she’d practised handstands and cartwheels, looked promising and mysterious in the dark evening. Before she turned to step back into the house, to return to her room and think about Conner, Ann looked at the disturbed drive and wondered if her dad would rake the gravel smooth before he left for work or when he returned. She guessed correctly and by the time she was awake the next morning the drive was as smooth as if Conner had never visited. She would never be like that, she decided. She could never be that tragic.
Ann fell in love quickly, and not just because of Conner’s looks, although her friends never quite believed that, but because he was so full of all the life that was absent from every room in her parents’ house. If he wasn’t working in the pub, he was on the other side of the bar, if he wasn’t drinking in the pub, he was off somewhere else, seeing someone else, planning something else. And his sleeves were always rolled up. Ann didn’t know why she liked that so much, but she realised one hot afternoon as she watched her dad mowing the back lawn from her bedroom window, with his shirt tucked into his trousers, his cuffs buttoned down at his wrists: she couldn’t remember a single time she’d ever seen her dad’s arms. Her parents didn’t say a word about the relationship. She imagined the conversation between them – her mum telling her dad to let it run its course, that the worst thing they could do would be to forbid; it would only make Ann more determined. So the relationship was tolerated at home, not that they ever spent any time there. They were always out. Conner’s world became Ann’s in a matter of weeks.
Ann knew her friends were jealous. They were left choosing from the sixth-form boys whilst she was riding on the back of Conner Ryan’s motorbike, going to parties on the other side of town, drinking in his favourite pubs, how could they not be jealous? She heard them talking one day when she was sat outside an open window of the common room.
‘He’s so affected,’ Juliette said.
‘I know, he gives me the creeps,’ Angela said.
‘And it’s not as if he’s that good-looking,’ Juliette again. ‘I think his chin is too big to be honest and that smile makes him look simple. And there’s no way he’s faithful to her. Someone like that, working in a pub all the time.’
Ann stood up, swung her bag over her shoulder, strode into the common room and said, ‘Hello girls!’ as brightly as she could, and watched as they rushed to smile and wave her over. Juliette had the gall to pat the free seat next to her. Ann paused, but went and sat. She couldn’t bring herself to care.
It lasted a year. Ann had even stopped questioning why Conner was with her and not one of the other waitresses or one of the girls who came in the pub to drool over him. She’d finally learnt to accept that Conner was in love with her. Weeks after she dropped her guard, he crushed her heart. She was with Juliette, they were on a study period walking to a cafe in the middle of town when they heard the distinctive high-pitched wail of Conner’s bike heading towards them over Church Brow. Ann couldn’t quell the excitement she felt in her stomach, the light-headedness she still experienced when she knew she would be seeing him. He crested the brow of the hill looking glorious, the sun and blue sky behind him like a cinema screen, but something was wrong with the picture. Ann didn’t understand what until the bike had almost passed her. On the back of the bike, where Ann always sat, was a blonde girl, her arms wrapped around Conner’s waist, her hair flapping across the front of her visor, Ann’s visor, whipping the back of Conner’s neck. He didn’t slow, he didn’t look at Ann, and then he was gone.
Juliette turned to Ann and said, ‘Fuck! Ann, are you alright?’ She was unable to suppress a giddy grin.
‘I’m fine,’ Ann said. ‘It was probably just a friend from the pub.’ She stalked off to the cafe, but when she lifted the coffee cup to her lips five minutes later she found that her hands were shaking.
If she’d seen it coming it wouldn’t have been so bad. Even a hint of a warning and she could have prepared herself, but the way she was dropped was brutal. Conner wouldn’t return her calls, swapped his shifts at the pub, and, if he couldn’t swap, barely acknowledged her at all. She longed to talk to him, to find out what she’d done wrong, to see if she could make it better, but Conner wouldn’t tolerate her approaches. When she cried he simply walked away. She realised she was becoming the laughable ex-girlfriend, pitied by his friends, mocked by the new girlfriend, and fought every instinct that told her to ru
n to him, throw herself at his feet and beg him to take her back. Ann couldn’t bear to have her mum fussing, or her dad being obviously kind, so she cut them dead as soon as they looked like broaching the subject. It was more difficult with her friends, who were dying to talk endlessly, unable to conceal the satisfaction they felt at Ann being dropped and shunted back to them in such a remorseless way. Ann started to avoid them. She preferred to suffer without spectators. Heartbreak shocked her. She thought about visiting the doctor at one point, so physically she felt the pain she began to confuse it with illness. She cried in her bedroom in the mornings and evenings and, when needed, in the toilets at the sixth form. In public she displayed a stoic face.
‘You’re doing very well,’ her mum said to her three weeks after Conner had stopped visiting and calling. Ann shrugged the comment away dismissively. ‘I’m fine,’ she snapped and walked off. Her parents and friends thought Ann was fully recovered months before she could drag herself out of bed without feeling heartbroken, humiliated and exhausted. She read The End of the Affair in secret in her room, her hands shaking as she turned the pages, her heart aching with desperate recognition. If only she’d read it before she met Conner, she wouldn’t have acted so recklessly, so carefree, so bloody stupidly. And all those bloody classes over all those years at school and nobody ever mentioned, nobody warned you or taught you to be careful, that heartbreak could tear you down.
Fourteen
Raymond ate his tea with the Chapmans and listened to Sheila relay the gossip she’d picked up on her visit to the village. She obviously hadn’t heard about the exploding car, or else she would have mentioned it. Sheila loved any trouble or wrongdoing; an affair in Abbeystead kept her eyes sparkling and her mouth busy for months. But today she stuck to the meagre gossip she’d managed to uncover and Chapman grunted his responses to her small revelations, commenting only when money was brought into the conversation.
‘How much?’
‘That’s what she told me.’
‘Who?’
‘Ainsworth.’
‘We’re in the wrong business, clearly.’
After helping Sheila with the dishes Raymond returned to his caravan and sat on the bed. He’d already decided he wouldn’t go night-walking that evening; he was tired from the events of the night before, he hadn’t slept until almost dawn.
Raymond had been a mile under the trees when he first heard the engine noise. He was unsure initially, it was a distant buzz, a small fly in the corner of a large room, but the sound grew louder and like sickness in the body it eventually revealed itself as unmistakably present. The noise swarmed around him, a mile to the left, to the north, and then behind him. The persistent intrusion brought to mind the two girls from number 13 and Raymond turned to head back towards his caravan. The cars had been coming recently at night, racing the forest roads, engines straining, and Raymond hated it. The noise unsettled him, it sounded sinister and dangerous, out of control. Raymond decided he would get himself home and lock the caravan door, something he only did when he heard cars in the forest. He was confused when he heard the explosion – all had been quiet for a while and he thought the car might have left for good. It was with reluctance he began to lumber his way to the source of the noise. He didn’t want anything to do with the trouble he was running towards, but he knew that someone might need help, and if he heard later that a young lad had died, alone in a wreck, the thought that he’d not helped would haunt him. Raymond didn’t swear, but as he pushed himself through the trees he said, ‘Fucking hell,’ out loud. ‘Fuck, fucking hell.’
It was the woman who’d dragged him indoors, Ann he thought she’d said her name was. He felt a pull of guilt at the memory of all his previous visits years before as he was shown into the house and ushered into the kitchen. Children were running around, firemen came and went, drinks were made and handed out. It was a commotion that was alien to Raymond. He sat at the kitchen table in the middle of it all and tried to keep up with what was being said. And then suddenly everyone was outside and he was alone with his drink. He walked into the hallway and glanced into the front room. The house was beautiful. The carpets thick and soft, the walls smooth and clean. He hoped he wasn’t making a mess; he checked his feet for mud and sniffed himself, to see if he smelt too much of the farm. He was as careful as possible with his drink, sure he would spill some. He downed the last of his tea with a gulp, returned to the kitchen, washed his cup and slipped out of the house, into the trees and back towards his caravan without anyone seeing. He fell asleep not thinking of burning, abandoned cars but warm houses, flat walls, soft carpets and clean smells. That was what he was thinking of now, back in the caravan again, remembering the house. He knew some people lived like that, of course he did, he’d seen pictures in magazines, programmes on television, but he’d never been in a house like that before. The Chapman farmhouse, whilst far removed from his own squalid home, still had frayed carpets, thin curtains, and dark rooms which needed decorating. In the Nortons’ house there were no odd chairs, no chipped cups. Everything was solid and expensive, everything had been chosen because it fitted the room and house. It pleased Raymond to see a family living there happily. He couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to wake up in one of the bedrooms, walk barefoot on those soft carpets to the bathroom in the morning. The parents probably had an en suite bathroom in their bedroom, he thought. Imagine that. In the mornings, at home, Raymond walked on cold, ratty floors to a freezing, ancient bathroom where he washed his body as quickly as he could at the sink. On the farm he had to brave all kinds of weather and rush across to the farmhouse for his allotted few minutes. But imagine waking up and walking a few steps to a bathroom in your own bedroom. Showering in hot water, drying yourself with a soft, clean towel and then stepping back onto deep carpet to get dressed. What a way to start the day.
Fifteen
As far back as when they were heading towards the burning car with buckets of heavy water Thomas knew that he would call round to see Raymond to say thank you. He felt it was important to acknowledge kindness, to show appreciation, and he was thankful that Raymond had run out from the trees and shaken him from his inactivity. But there was an ulterior motive. The night had shaken Thomas, upset him, and he wanted someone to talk to. He couldn’t talk to Ann; he was sure that she’d enjoyed the commotion, enjoyed the busy house and he didn’t trust her to understand how he’d been feeling. The next morning, when he was tired and irritable, he was met by a bright and bouncy Ann in the kitchen, chatting away with the children about the fire engine, the explosion, the naughty men from the town who’d stolen the car. The episode seemed to cheer her up whilst Thomas had been heavy with worry since that night. Before the burning car he’d never considered the possibility of crime in Abbeystead, he believed the further away from towns and cities, the safer you were. But now he saw vulnerability in their remoteness. They were further away from criminals, that was probably true, but they were also further away from help, and Thomas had been made to realise that criminals travelled. He wanted to talk about it. To a man who could reassure him. A local.
He knew Raymond’s farm on Nell Lane, it was only two miles away, just outside the forest. It was a week after the fire when Thomas drove up the bumpy track in his Land Rover, driving slowly over cattle grids, keeping a close eye on the sheep which scattered recklessly in front of him in disorganised bursts. He reached the farmhouse and parked next to a dirtier, older Land Rover. A woman with stiff short hair and the face of a mole opened the front door. Squinting into the light she said, ‘Are you here for Frank?’
Thomas was sure he’d heard the man say ‘Raymond’, but it had been a strange night, the man had spoken softly and he was at the only farm on Nell Lane. He must have misheard. He was about to explain who he was and why he was there when the woman turned and bellowed for Frank.
‘Come in,’ she said, standing back. She led the way down a dark corridor. ‘I’m Sheila, Frank’s wife.’
She bawl
ed for Frank again and this time a short, balding, red-faced man, in his fifties at least, appeared from a room at the bottom of the murky corridor. The two men met in the narrow space and Thomas felt ridiculous, he’d come to the wrong house somehow.
‘Sorry,’ Thomas said, ‘I must have got the wrong farm. I was looking for a different man.’ Thomas raised his hand in front of him like a forklift, ‘A big man, brown hair.’
‘Raymond,’ Sheila and Frank said together.
‘That’s it,’ said Thomas, relieved, ‘Raymond.’
‘You’ll need the caravan round the back then. He’s already had his tea.’ Sheila flapped Thomas back the way he’d come and when he stepped out of the front door she waved her hand and said, ‘Right round the back, past the sheds, past the shippen, you’ll find him in his caravan there.’ Sheila watched Thomas go. He was Raymond’s first ever visitor.
Into the Trees Page 5
