Born to Be Trouble

by Sheila Jeffries

  Todd stared at him. A twinkle of knowing passed between them. ‘Oh – all right then. Fifty quid.’

  ‘Done,’ said Freddie and they shook hands.

  It was nearly lunchtime. Freddie got into the driver’s seat and set off towards Langport. The straight half-mile of road leading out of Monterose was a good place to test a car. He put his foot down and drove flat out in the little car, wanting to see if the engine would cope without boiling. It made a lot of noise, but it was fine, and as he topped the crest of the hill he pulled into a gateway with a view across the Levels to the distant Quantocks. Only then, in the sudden stillness, did he realise someone was in the car with him. A woman with a coil of silver hair and burning blue eyes. Her voice was a silvery whisper with long snake-like vowels that pinned him to the seat so that he couldn’t move.

  ‘You were driving her much too fast,’ she said. ‘But, yes, this is the right car for Tessa.’

  Freddie was electrified. How did she know he had bought the car for Tessa? He waited, too shocked to speak.

  ‘You have nothing to fear,’ whispered the voice. ‘This car is full of my energy and my love. I will be Tessa’s guardian. It is part of the plan. She has my gift.’

  Freddie felt a smile of recognition stretching across his cheeks. He’d bought a haunted car. A car haunted by a spirit who knew what he knew about his beautiful daughter. A benevolent spirit who wanted to help her. He turned to look into those burning blue eyes, and as he did so she vanished like threads of silver silk blown away by the wind from the sea.

  It had been so long since this had happened to him. He’d been like a soul asleep on the hard bedrock of survival, marching on like a warrior through shellfire. And now he’d reached a bright horizon, a distant place where clouds parted into a rose gold smile of light.

  Tell no one, he thought. Tell no one. It’s too fragile to share. Too precious.

  Hungry for his lunch, Freddie turned towards the Polden Hills, intending to eat his picnic up on the ridgeway and gaze out across the peat moors towards the sea. But the spirit of Lady Fontwell hadn’t finished with him. Her voice whispered insistently through his consciousness. ‘Tessa needs you.’ He tried to ignore it, thinking Art would be there. He wanted his daughter to himself. After lunch he had to get on with some work. The Morris Minor was going slower and slower, as if it had a mind of its own. The voice kept coming. ‘Tessa needs you.’

  Freddie sighed. He pulled into a gateway, turned the car and headed back through Monterose. He actually felt shy about going into Tessa’s field and knocking on the door of the bus. The fear was old family stuff, imparted by his mother. It had dripped through his lifetime like the cold tap over the Belfast sink in the scullery. He’d fought it and mostly overcome it, but in the last few years his confidence had cracked. Losing Lucy. Tessa’s suicide attempt. His illness. Dr Jarvis’s voice telling him he could no longer do the work he loved.

  It turned out that he didn’t have to go and knock on the door of the bus. He found Tessa in the lane, leaning over the gate to Lexi’s horse field. She was by herself. He gave the horn a little toot and pulled the car onto the grass verge. He wasn’t going to tell her he’d bought it for her. He’d tinker with it first, and give it to her on her birthday, or maybe Christmas.

  Tessa swung round. ‘Dad!’

  Freddie knew Tessa very well. He knew the way her face pouted when she was guarding pain, the way her pale blue eyes lost their light. He got out of the car and stood in silence, looking into her soul.

  ‘Oh Dad.’ She studied his eyes for a moment of trying to hold herself together.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ he asked, and Tessa collapsed against him, her body heaving with sobs. Freddie held her silently, his hands smoothing the tresses of chestnut hair that hung down her back, feeling the beads and ribbons she had woven into it, the denim jacket, the heat of her crying. He found it difficult, sometimes impossible, to use the word ‘love’ but he felt it intensely. He hoped Tessa would sense how much he loved her.

  ‘Have you had lunch?’ he asked, eventually. It was the only thing he could think of to say.

  Tessa shook her head.

  ‘You get in the car with me – I were gonna eat my lunch up on the ridgeway,’ he said. ‘There’s enough for two. Lardy cake as well.’

  She looked up at him, her face covered in tears.

  ‘Come on.’ Freddie opened the passenger door and steered her inside. He drove in silence towards Hilbegut, through the village and up the steep wooded lane, sensing Tessa calming down beside him, the sobs ebbing away. She’d tell him, all in good time, he figured, and if she didn’t, it wouldn’t matter.

  ‘Is this a new car, Dad?’ She managed to sound normal, though her voice was low.

  ‘Ah. I only just bought it. Hold tight – I’m not sure if she’ll go up this blimin’ hill.’ Freddie changed gear and put his foot down. The car took off like a bumble bee. Two wings of steam leaked out from under the bonnet as he pulled into the gateway and stopped. ‘She’s boiling. Hear it?’ He got out, lifted the bonnet, and clouds of steam wafted away into the trees. ‘We’ll go and have our picnic and let her cool down.’

  The narrow path to the ridgeway was colourful with pink and orange spindleberries, clusters of blue-black sloes, and the yellowing leaves of hazels still laden with nuts. The turf was carpeted with layer upon layer of fallen leaves, opening out onto the hillside grassland, nodding with seedheads of grasses and knapweed. Freddie and Tessa walked in silence up to the skyline where the light shone white through the geometric tufts of thistle seed. The view was a breathtaking chessboard of greens and golds, all the way to the silver brown shores of the Bristol Channel, twenty miles away. A misty sheen of water, and the sapphire blue outline of the Welsh coast beyond.

  ‘I missed this place,’ Tessa said.

  The sun was warm on the turf. Freddie took off his jacket and spread it out for them to sit on. ‘Kate and I always came up here,’ he said. ‘It’s a good place to – to think.’ He just stopped himself reminding Tessa that she had chosen this wild hillside for her suicide attempt.

  ‘I wanted to die in a beautiful place, Dad, in case you’re wondering about it,’ she said, as if sensing his thought. ‘It was Art who found me. He was good to me.’

  ‘Ah – he were.’ Freddie unwrapped the greaseproof paper. He broke the slice of pork pie in half and offered it to her.

  Tessa shook her head. ‘No thanks, Dad. I’m vegetarian now. And not hungry. You eat it.’

  Freddie restrained himself from airing his views on vegetarians. ‘I’ll do the eating, and you do the talking,’ he said.

  Tessa sighed and wriggled close to him, as close as she could get with the two of them sitting on his jacket. ‘Suddenly my life is crowded with obstacles,’ she said.

  ‘Ah – obstacles – but, are they obstacles or are they choices?’

  ‘They are obstacles, and no matter what I say or do they won’t go away. They just won’t.’

  Freddie heard remnants of the sobs buffeting her breath as she talked. He picked up an acorn which had blown down from a nearby oak tree. ‘You’ve gotta be a tree,’ he said. ‘If a tree root comes to a rock, it doesn’t try to go through, it goes round. But what you gotta remember is that the rock will make the tree’s root system stronger in the end, so it can hold tight when the wind blows.’

  He watched her eyes. They were thoughtful as she fingered the plump golden acorn in its knobbly cup. ‘If you close your eyes, you can feel its life force,’ she said. ‘Art taught me that. You should try it, Dad.’

  ‘I’m eating me lunch,’ he said, but stored the idea away in a corner of his mind.

  ‘Art’s taught me a lot,’ Tessa said, and then she began to talk. Everything, except the contraception issue. Ian Tillerman. The Post Office. The build-up of anger and frustration.

  Freddie listened, sensing she was leaving something out, some women’s stuff, he figured. But the anger which had been pouring out of Tessa w
as slowing down, drifting now, allowing her to breathe and look at the world again.

  ‘When you saw me,’ she concluded, ‘I was looking at Lexi’s horses. Selwyn is my special horse and I really wanted to see her and make sure she was okay. I kind of hoped to see Lexi too – she was a good friend to me.’

  ‘Ah – she was,’ agreed Freddie. Tessa had spent the previous summer working for Lexi between school and college. She was proud of the way Tessa had managed to calm and understand Selwyn who was suffering from a back injury. The beautiful dappled grey mare had responded to Tessa’s love, and shown her that she could heal.

  ‘I was worried because Selwyn wasn’t there.’ Tessa hesitated. Freddie saw a new pain surfacing in her eyes, a shadow of what was to come. ‘But the worse problem was that I – I couldn’t go home.’

  That was it, Freddie thought. Those four words, ‘I couldn’t go home’ had come out of her as a cry from the heart. Now she was silent again, looking at him, her fingers twiddling an amber bead that glinted in her hair. The amber echoed the flecks of gold in the centre of her light blue eyes. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  ‘Because – THIS WOMAN was there.’ Suddenly Tessa was angry again. ‘She said her name was Rowan – and I hated her, I just hated her on sight. Her eyes are like flint, and she’s bitter and challenging, if you know what I mean, Dad. People like her really wind me up. I could kill her! – And she’s got a baby which she brandishes at the world. You can’t touch me ’cause I’ve got a baby – that sort of attitude.’

  ‘So – was she in the bus?’

  ‘No – worse. She lives in a converted horsebox and she had the cheek to just drive it in and park – in MY field – and when I confronted her she smiled in a patronising way and said Art had invited her to camp there. Then she said Art had gone to help a mate fix a stove in his camper van. She said he’d asked her to keep an eye on me, for goodness’ sake. And I don’t want her there, Dad, I just wanted peace and solitude. I asked her to leave and she wouldn’t – she sat there flaunting her superiority, trying to make me feel like a silly child. She didn’t respect me at all. I HATED her.’

  Freddie put his arm around Tessa and gave her a kindly pat on the shoulder. ‘Why don’t you come home? Stay with us while Art’s away – I don’t like to think of you alone in that bus. I know it’s all nicely fitted out – he’s made a good job of it – but you can come home, Tessa.’

  ‘But Dad – I WANT to live with Art. It was working beautifully in Cornwall – we were in the sea every day – and the commune were so friendly. They just accepted me – no questions – no judgements. And you have to understand this, Dad – my life with Art is the most beautiful and precious thing. I have to make a go of it, whatever it takes.’

  CHAPTER 4

  The Tide in London

  The mysterious mist that hung low over the Somerset Levels was reputed to be the ghost of an ocean which had been there centuries ago. It turned the hills into islands. Glastonbury Tor, Burrow Mump, Dundon Beacon and Lollover became the enchanted isles, floating on the expanse of shining mist. There was even a legend of a phantom ship – the Argo Navis, the ship of the sun that sailed into the west and disappeared.

  Tessa imagined it now, as she walked home an hour before sunset. A tall ship with translucent sails, its timbers glistening with encrusted salt, gliding soundlessly on the white tide of mist, nearer and nearer to the water meadows of Monterose. She paused to lean on a gate and dream with it. A lucky ship it would be. A love ship for her and Art. Lucky, and private, and eternal.

  The evening sun flung stripes of rose pink light across the surface of the mist, turning the windows of Monterose into mirrors of gold. Tessa was feeling better after the time with her father. She’d stayed for tea and Kate had arrived home, jubilant, with an empty car, a roll of cash and a beaming smile. They’d laughed and laughed over the tale of how she’d parked illegally in Lyme Regis and duped a policeman into holding two bird boxes while she delivered an order to a pet shop.

  Kate had given Tessa a warm hug, a five-pound note, and yet another basket of goodies to share with Art. They’d talked about the woman with the baby, and Kate had said, ‘You hold your head up, dear, and be proud of who you are. We’re proud of you, aren’t we, dear?’ and Freddie had said, ‘Ah – we are.’

  Tessa felt nurtured and confident. She’d be polite to Rowan, but make it clear that Art was hers. They were lovers. Lovers across time. And no one could come between them.

  She watched the tall ship she had imagined. Or was it real? Momentarily there was a blurred edge between fantasy and reality, a shore of crinkling silk and lace, a shore of deception. She heard the creak of timbers, the snap of the mast and she saw the floating black splinters, the billowing sails ripped and torn into rags. The cries of sailors as the charred carcass sank below the waves with terrifying speed.

  Disturbed by the dark vision, Tessa walked on quickly, reassured by the friendly weight of the willow basket over her arm, a bit of home comfort – bright apples and homemade ginger cake, a Pyrex dish with one of Kate’s pies. The windows of Monterose darkened, the mist shone pearly white, the air chilled as she hurried down the lane, a tingle of excitement in her spine.

  Walk tall, she thought, and turned into the gate of the field. She’d be bouncy and radiant. Confident and full of light, the way Art liked her to be.

  The basket fell to the floor. She stopped, suddenly death-cold. The field was empty. The horsebox had gone.

  And so had the bus.

  Tessa couldn’t move. She felt herself sinking into cold wet estuary sand, down, down into the dungeons of the bedrock. The sparkle of her bright spirit was leaving. Not flying gloriously into the gold-rimmed cumuli of evening. Not dancing in the glittering waves. But sinking. Going deep into paralysing mud. Leaving. Opting out. Earth to earth. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

  Her eyes picked out something white in the hedge. An envelope, in the front pocket of her rucksack. I can’t read it, she thought. But her feet plodded towards it. Her eyes looked down. The rucksack was open at the top, and all her stuff had been hastily crammed in there. Lou’s ethnic blanket. Her spare clothes. Her green bottle of Silvikrin shampoo. Her diary stuffed with monochrome photos of Selwyn and Jonti. The jar of sand from Porthmeor Beach, the black elvan pebble and seashells. In the middle of it the gold-rimmed pages of The Water Babies glinted.

  Tessa’s hand reached out and picked up the white envelope by its corner. The name stung like a nettle under her fingertips. TESSA – in Art’s stylish, curving capitals. Who am I? she thought. I’m not that person and I can’t read that letter. Not yet.

  She heaved the heavy rucksack onto her back and walked out into the lane. The lights of Monterose twinkled and cosy squares of firelight glowed from cottage windows. The Pines looked far away, standing apart from the village, with bright yellow lights in the kitchen and living room. I can’t go home, Tessa thought. Not after this. Not with this letter like a poisoned wafer in my pocket.

  She turned her back on Monterose and headed up the lane towards the main road, letting her legs take her in punishing strides through the violet dusk.

  And she didn’t look back.

  The willow basket was left where she had dropped it in the grass. A pair of crows flew down to investigate. They pecked the apples, and pushed the lid off the Pyrex dish. Soon there was a circle of crows, magpies and jackdaws, squabbling and tearing Kate’s pie to bits, flying up with beaks full of pastry and dropping it all over the field. A fox came and sniffed at everything. He took the whole ginger cake in his jaws and ran off into the wood with it.

  Tessa walked up the lane, hearing only the rhythmic thud of her footsteps and the haunting cry of the tawny owls hooting in the wood. A heron passed over on ponderous wings, heading for its roosting place in the tall ash trees.

  When she reached the main road it was getting dark. Tessa paused by the black and white signpost on a triangle of grass. She touched the cold lettering. MONTEROSE. Goodbye, she
thought, and fought back the cyclones of grief that loomed and circled in her innermost mind. She touched ILCHESTER and YEOVIL, the raised letters gritty and wet under her fingers. London was far away, but the road would lead her onto the A303 at Podimore. Then over the chalk downs of Salisbury Plain, past Stonehenge and on towards London.

  Tessa saw London as a rabbit hole. Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole. A great place to disappear. To enter a labyrinth of anonymity and possibility. A place where no one cared who you were or what you had done.

  She knew how to hitchhike. Her friend Faye had taught her at college. Doing it on your own was scary, and ‘inadvisable’. But who cared? Who cared about her now? A dropout. A hippie. That had seemed exciting and creative while she was Art’s woman. But who was she now? A reject. Reject, REJECT.

  She swung her rucksack down and propped it against the signpost. She listened for a car, but heard only the velvet pattering of leaves falling onto the tarmac. The stillness and the quiet were unnerving. To be running away but standing still. I’m broken-hearted, she thought suddenly, and saw herself running and running for the rest of her life to avoid facing the paralysing pain that waited in the stillness.

  At last the sound of a car struggling up the steep hill, its gears grinding, the headlights sending dazzling shafts of yellow scissoring through the trees. Tessa stepped to the edge of the road and lifted her arm to thumb a lift.

  Three days later, Freddie and Kate stood looking at the Morris Minor outside The Pines. ‘What a dear little car!’ Kate said, giving the new car an appreciative pat on the bonnet. She walked round it and peered in the windows. ‘It’s got nice green seats, and it’s so clean. I’m thrilled, Freddie. Fancy you going off and buying Tessa a car. She’ll love it.’

  ‘Well – I hope she don’t go painting daisies all over it,’ Freddie said.

  ‘She probably will!’ Kate opened the door and smoothed the driver’s seat, imagining her daughter driving it, looking capable and sophisticated like Fiona Tillerman. ‘And you didn’t tell her? Didn’t you even give her a hint it was for her?’