From a Distance

by Raffaella Barker

  His phone pinged with a text. Pulling it out of his pocket he squinted at the screen.

  How old is your car?

  It was from Luisa.

  He typed Very, then added a kiss. Then deleted it again and sent the message. Another chimed back, straight away, What do you know about rust?

  ‘Get off the pitch!’ A man in a white coat and brimmed hat gestured with his thumb, his facial muscles a shrug of astonished righteousness. Kit, legging it, almost ran straight into the next batsman walking in. It was Luca.

  ‘Hey,’ he put on his helmet, brushing Kit’s shoulder with a clumsy gloved hand.

  ‘Good luck,’ Kit turned on his heel to watch Luca take his place at the wicket.

  Thank God he’d deleted the kiss from his message to Luisa, he thought, and sent another one:

  At cricket with Luca. Why r u not here?

  No going back from a sent text. The cinnamon taste in his mouth reminded him that there might be coffee here somewhere. His toothpick was chewed to a splinter, he spat it onto the ground, encountering a severe look from an elderly lady perching, parrot-like, on a red plastic chair. He nodded a greeting and hurried past her. At the pavilion, a line of chairs and a picnic rug were occupied by cricket bags, cool boxes and a few spectators. Luca faced his first ball and the crack of the bat rang out.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit like duelling?’

  ‘Duelling?’ Kit repeated blankly. A woman in a yellow dress had got up from a rug to clap.

  ‘You know, two men face one another over a short distance and fire. I just thought the bat sounded like a shot. Of a gun.’ She swooped to pick up a daisy chain she’d dropped to clap. ‘Well done, Lux,’ she called as another shot cracked into the sky.

  ‘It’s a four.’ Kit clapped too. ‘I see what you mean,’ he agreed. ‘The clearing, the wooded surroundings. Should be pistols at dawn, but bats at midday is in the same spirit, I guess.’

  A small girl cartwheeled on the rug beside Kit and pulled at the woman’s sleeve. ‘Mummy what did he do? Why didn’t he run?’

  ‘Oh, they’re always running or not running,’ murmured the mother. Kit stared at her dress. He blinked. Yellow crêpe de Chine, bright silk-covered buttons and tiny orange feathers tumbling across the fabric. Unmistakeable. And rare. It was a Lighthouse design from the 1970s. The woman caught him staring and held out her hand in greeting.

  Kit shook it, her skin was cool. ‘Hi,’ she smiled. ‘I think you must be Kit? You’re Lou and Tom’s new friend.’

  Kit must have looked surprised, she dropped her hand on to his arm, ‘Don’t worry, it’s just village life, we don’t have enough to talk about. I’m Dora, by the way, Tom’s sister.’

  ‘Tom? Oh yes. Luisa told me about you. Well they both did.’

  In his pocket, his phone buzzed, he didn’t dare get it out, too embarrassing if it was a text from Luisa.

  ‘This might sound odd,’ he said, ‘but I’m curious about the dress you’re wearing. Where did you get it?’

  Dora giggled. ‘That’s a new opening line,’ she said, and lowered her voice. ‘The old biddies are peering at us, I’m always in trouble for making too much noise, bet they think something worth watching is about to happen. Why d’you ask, by the way?’

  Kit laughed. ‘It’s Seventies. My mother designed that fabric in collaboration with Biba. Not many were made. I gave one to the Costume Museum in Bath about three years ago. It was so tiny they had to use a child’s mannequin to show it. Silk crêpe, bias cut and far too many buttons for nowadays. Where did you get it?’

  Dora looked down at herself. ‘I’m a props buyer, so I go to a lot of vintage fairs. Funnily enough, this came from one down in Bristol.’ She smoothed the dress over her hips and sucked her stomach in. ‘I love it,’ she said, then blinked at him. ‘You’re from that neck of the woods, Lou said?’

  ‘Yes, Penzance, bit further than Bristol,’ Kit said. ‘Makes more sense for one of these to appear in the west country than at a Norfolk cricket match.’ His mind raced through an imagined conversation between Dora and Luisa where he featured in an excellent light. Was she coming here?

  ‘Really? I love Bristol, don’t get anywhere like that much now.’ Dora raked a hand through her hair and sighed. Kit hoped she was not about to unburden herself, although there was the hope that she might talk about Luisa.

  ‘So you’re old friends with Tom and Luisa?’ he sat down on the rug beside Dora.

  She raised her sunglasses and narrowed her eyes. ‘Old friends is one way of putting it. Or you could say, as I just did, that I’m Tom’s sister.’ The sunglasses clamped down again and she raised her chin. Clearly a girl who was used to having a man hang on her words.

  Kit laughed, ‘Sorry, yes, of course, you did. I was side-tracked by the dress. So do you live nearby?’

  Dora’s nostrils flared. He watched uneasily. She could go either way. Cross, or not. After a moment she sighed, and although she ignored his question, she didn’t appear actively cross. ‘Your mother was the designer? That’s fascinating. I’ve come across Lighthouse Fabrics a lot over the years. Tell me, though, how do you catalogue your archive? Luisa and I googled the company, but it was difficult to see it all.’

  ‘Luisa? Did she? I mean, did you?’ The nostrils flared again. Dora chewed her lip.

  Kit realised he was sounding over-eager. ‘Yes, our archive. It’s a headache, frankly, but of course we do it. Next month, when I get back to Cornwall, we’ll be putting the whole thing in order. In a new order.’ A shout from the pitch flew high as a fielder lunged to catch a shot and landed heavily. Kit winced. ‘Ouch, seems a pretty hard-hitting match. Which team are you on?’

  Dora smiled. ‘Luca’s team, of course! But I’m not really into cricket. I’m meeting Luisa here. Maddie loves coming to watch, although it’s the picnic and the play area rather than the performances.’

  Luca hit another shot low towards the boundary, a fielder raced in pursuit. ‘Luisa’s coming is she?’ Kit simply couldn’t resist repeating her name. The sibilant syllables thrummed in the air above the picnic rug. He sneaked a glance at his phone. He had to roll off the rug, crushing some of Maddie’s daisies, so Dora didn’t see the message.

  On way, how great you are there.

  Luckily Dora wasn’t looking. She was fishing about in a wicker basket from which she pulled a bag of carrot sticks and a pot of green paste. ‘Have some,’ she urged. ‘Luisa’s bringing cucumber sorbet, she’s obsessed with making ice cream, you know.’ Dora bit into a carrot stick, putting more on a plate for Maddie with cheese and a packet of crisps. ‘I’ve got a few other vintage dresses, you know, I mean ones with the Lighthouse label in them.’ She broke off. ‘Maddie, come and eat this. Where was I? Oh, it doesn’t matter. Oh yes, it’s just that I always thought they must have been made by an artist, they have such unusual detail. I’ve got one with butterfly nets and shrimps. It’s one of the nicest dresses I own.’

  ‘We do the fabrics really, not the clothes,’ he said. ‘That’s what we sell, and that’s what Mum sold. I’ve worked in the business all my life, travelled with it, and lived and breathed it. When my mother died I took it over.’

  ‘Look, Mummy!’ Maddie jumped up from her picnic. Luca’s batting triumph had ended on a catch. He walked in dragging his bat.

  ‘Luca Ducca! You . . . Are . . . Out!’ she shouted. ‘Come on and let’s play over here!’

  Luca flicked her cheek. ‘Shh! Don’t tell everyone,’ he whispered.

  ‘You can’t hide it,’ she said severely. ‘But you can play with me now.’

  ‘I will if you get me a drink. There’s some Coke in there, Mads,’ Luca folded himself into a chair and squinted at Kit. ‘How’s the Lighthouse?’

  ‘Pretty good, thanks.’ Kit offered a carrot stick, Luca shook his head. ‘I’m still besieged by farm animals. Those sheep your parents took away seem to have been replaced by a herd of piglets. Apparently they’ve come to do some digging in a kind of compou
nd just outside my gate.’

  Luca rolled a cigarette and lit it. ‘Yeah, it’s like that around here. There are way more animals than people, you know, and if you think about it, where you live in the Lighthouse, most of your neighbours are fish.’

  Kit’s laughter made Dora turn her head. ‘Luisa’s here. Hope everyone’s hot. She was telling me earlier that she’s bringing her gooseberry and ginger ice cream. I hope she has – it’s incredible. It’s in a weird metal hand cart thing she says she bought on eBay. I wonder if it’ll keep it cold or just give everyone Legionnaires’ Disease?’

  Luca rolled his eyes, and sighed. ‘Oh no. Mum said she’d got some sort of mobile stall she was threatening to bring. I hoped it wouldn’t happen.’

  Kit looked round and saw her. Luisa had positioned herself in the shade by the pavilion. She had rolled up the sleeves of her purple shirt and kicked off her shoes. A queue had already formed around her, and she looked in her element as she scooped pale green ice cream into bright pink wafers.

  ‘I’m just going to say hello to your mother,’ he told Luca.

  ‘Good idea, I’ll come too.’

  They got up and made their way towards Luisa.

  ‘I know it’s not a proper cone, but it tastes like one,’ she was saying to a suspicious pair of boys. ‘You can just taste the cucumber sorbet if you like?’

  ‘It looks a bit weird,’ muttered one.

  ‘Yeah, I’d prefer a Magnum,’ said the other.

  Kit had a powerful desire to bang their heads together. He made do with scowling. He was almost breathless with anticipation as he approached Luisa. His gaze flickered from her face to the crumpled shirt, the worn belt defining her waist. Her arms. She had piled her hair up and held it in place with a pencil. His mother had always used a paintbrush in her hair. How funny, he’d never noticed anyone else do that. He shoved his hands in his pockets and twisted around in a circle. As he turned back, Luisa shrieked, dropped the scoop and stepped back.

  ‘Bugger, I’ll do you another,’ she said to the small girl who was looking doubtfully at her ice cream, upside down on the grass.

  ‘Mum quite often seems to spill it when we’re around,’ Luca commented.

  ‘Does she always make such an effort?’ Kit was mesmerised. Luisa popped a raspberry on to a mound of ice cream and gave the cone to the child.

  ‘Yeah, you can’t stop Mum. Ice cream’s her thing. She can do anything with it. She used to make it in castle shapes with dragons and stuff for our birthdays when we were kids. Her hands would go blue.’ Luca stretched his fingers in front of him as if to check the colour of his own extremities. Kit did the same. Blue fingers, quite some dedication, he thought.

  ‘Once she fainted and we had to put a hot-water bottle on her head, but nothing stops her. I felt a bit sorry for her that we got too old for pirate parties and stuff. Her talent needs more scope.’

  ‘Or scoop?’ suggested Kit.

  Luca laughed. ‘Scoop or scope. Whatever, she’s obsessed. Maybe you should get her to cook for your party? Are you really having one? The Lighthouse is the coolest venue ever.’

  Luca’s sweet-natured enthusiasm charmed him. ‘I’m going to make it a painting party,’ he announced, surprising himself as much as those around him. ‘I’ve got to get the place decorated for the new tenants, and so far all the local decorators I’ve contacted are booked up or they say they can’t do curved rooms.’ Kit nodded to himself. The plan was falling into place. It hadn’t been a plan at all, but it was now. ‘So I was thinking,’ he said, thinking it there and then, ‘that if I ask people to come and help me paint, we could have a big feast with music and plenty of drink afterwards. It’d be the Lighthouse whitewash party, I suppose.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Luca. The monosyllable was the seal of approval Kit needed. ‘I’ll come.’

  Dora had wandered over to them. ‘I’m dying to see it, and I like the idea of painting a round room.’

  ‘Just about anything you do is fun if you do it in a round room,’ agreed Luisa, who had made a beeline for Luca with an overflowing cone. She licked her fingers. The ice cream and Luisa’s lips were deep pink. ‘Quick, you’ve got to try this. Dive in before it melts.’ Luca took the ice cream.

  Maddie had been surreptitiously sipping Coke from a plastic cup. She waved it at Luca. ‘Here you are. Sorry. Most of the Coke fell out.’ She looked at Kit, weighing him up. ‘Can I come to the Lighthouse party? I’ve always wanted to go to one of those.’

  He rested a hand on her head, then snatched it away again. Who was he to go around patting children’s heads? ‘Everyone can come,’ he said.

  ‘Mum, you can make the dinner,’ Luca suggested, he nudged Kit towards the pavilion, ‘Come on, mate, I’ll introduce you to some more of the team, they’ll come and paint.’

  By the time Kit left the cricket ground, his party was shaping up, and a summer storm had turned the sky a hectic purple. The Lighthouse was a magnet, everyone knew it, and everyone wanted to see inside it. Next Saturday was mooted, and free beer mentioned, and suddenly the whole cricket team wanted to meet Kit. He had more friends in an hour in Norfolk than he’d made back home in years. Watching Luisa negotiate her car out of the gateway, scraping her bumper, the orange parasol fluttering out of the car window, speckled by rain, Kit was bemused. Where was Tom? The ice-cream stand had taken three of them to load, and it still looked as though it might fall off at any moment. What sort of man leaves his wife to heave great metal contraptions around on her own? Reversing on to the road he looked out of his back window and flinched with embarrassment. Luisa’s grass-stained plimsolls were on the back seat. He’d picked them up, and without thinking he must have put them in his car in the rush to be done before the rain came. Driving with one hand on the wheel, he got his phone out and wrote her a text.

  Kidnapped your shoes. Will return.

  He put his phone away, turning the windscreen wipers to their fastest setting. Lightning flashed, and he imagined Luisa running barefoot across storm-drenched grass from the car to her house. She would be soaked.

  Sunday dawned bright after a night of storms, Kit rolled over and squinted at the face of his watch. ‘Christ!’ He leapt up. Almost ten o’clock, he hadn’t slept this late for years. Downstairs he made coffee, padding around the ground floor. ‘You could call it the round floor,’ he mused. The curved walls, the red stripes and the limitless views of his dwelling had lost none of their charm or surprise. It was like living in a cartoon. He flung open the double doors, blinking, juggling his sunglasses and the coffee while he switched on his mobile phone. Would there be a message?

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘Shit! Ow!’ Hot coffee splashed Kit’s wrist as he leapt back. He didn’t know whether to focus on the torrent of buzzing from his phone or the two people in his garden. The individuals fiddling with a fence post just metres from the door watched calmly as Kit dropped his phone and stepped back into the hall. He was only wearing his jeans, and they were covered in coffee. His phone vibrated helplessly from the stone doorstep. The younger of the two men stepped forward to pick it up, wiping it on the sleeve of his T-shirt, and offered it through the open door to Kit.

  It chimed again. ‘You’re popular,’ he said. ‘We’ve mended the gaps in your boundary this morning.’ He proffered a muddy hand, ‘Jay Hopkins. That’s my dad, Bruce.’ Bruce wiped his forehead on a big handkerchief. Behind him, two pigs sniffed at the wheels of the pick up truck the Hopkins had parked.

  ‘Pigs. Yes, of course, the pigs,’ said Kit. ‘I’m never far from a farm animal at the Lighthouse,’ he raised his coffee cup to Bruce. ‘I’ll get dressed and be right with you.’

  Jay remained on the doorstep. ‘We would’ve asked you where you’d like the opening, but you didn’t stir out of the house and we didn’t want to wake you.’

  Kit coughed. Nowhere to go with this one. He’d been asleep. Not that they seemed bothered. His phone vibrated again. Amazing how a supposedly inanimate object could be s
o imperious.

  You solved my shoe mystery . . . How much is ransom? x L

  His thumb hovered to respond straight away, but he stopped. Better get dressed. Bruce and Jay, having peered past him through the open doors, had seen enough.

  ‘You’re all right,’ said Bruce kindly. ‘No rush. We’ll be off now anyway. You know where we are if you need anything?’

  ‘Now you mention it,’ said Kit, his hand on the open window of the truck, ‘I don’t suppose you know where I can get hold of a few trestle tables for Saturday?’

  ‘We’ll sort you out there, no worries,’ said Bruce.

  Alone again, Kit texted Luisa.

  Shoe ransom urgent! Food for 20 including ice cream of your choice. Deliver Saturday in person. X

  No sooner sent than regretted. The last part came under the heading ‘Going too Far’. ‘Self-control is all,’ he remembered, too late. ‘Think before you act.’ As if this gave him licence, he then sent another text to Luisa.

  Seriously though, feast required. How much do you charge?

  An answer pinged back.

  Lighthouse Ices under starter’s orders! Do you need a slave girl?

  Lighthouse Ices? Good idea. Perhaps it could become a subsidiary of Lighthouse Fabric. It could be the moment to have a business conversation with Luisa. The prospect was a lot more appealing than talking to his accountants. He tapped in his reply and sent it.

  Kit didn’t have any expectations of his party. Secretly, he hadn’t believed anyone would come, but escorted by Luca and Mae, at Luisa’s suggestion, he had gone to Steddings, the Blythe hardware store, and bought quantities of sandpaper, filler, paintbrushes, rollers, tins of paint, masking tape and dust sheets. Just in case. Early on the appointed morning, he looked at the pile of decorating materials and laughed. Who was he kidding?