~*~
Deluge. The river presses at its limits, filthy brown, tangled with detritus, a monster. Rain lashes down in rods. The river banks squirm, dissolving into mud.
The man tugs at the brim of his hat and starts to walk. His mind is set on the journey to the midwife, the path along the river, the shortcut up through the trees. Nothing else matters. He is intent.
Water everywhere – above him, below him, all around. Within moments he is drenched. The man steps on the footbridge. He knows the way to go, how quick he must be. The route unfolds in front of him. He wills himself to his destination.
The river surges, reaches out a multitude of cold brown paws, knocks the man from the bridge, turns him over, clutches him, swallows him.
Within a moment he’s gone. The rain continues.
The river rises again, in a great wave, spilling over its restraints, pouring over the field to one side, the house on the other.
Above, in a lighted window, the woman screams.
She needs him. Waits for him.
Waits.
~*~
Eleanor stood in the front doorway. The man had disappeared.
The rain eased and a moment later sunlight penetrated the cloud and beamed into the house.
She shut the door. When she tried the handle again, it was locked. Drops glittered on the window in the parlour. The mirror above the fireplace had a crack running through it. In the kitchen an enamel pot on the dresser had overturned, spilling aged beans that had begun to sprout, while conversely, the holly on the table had withered, leaves and berries turning black.
Eleanor’s mind was empty, her heart drained and scoured out. She didn’t want to stay in the house. She never wanted to visit it again. She locked the back door as she left, and replaced the key beneath the broken terra cotta pot.
When Eleanor got home, Constance was sitting by the fire, reading a novel.
“I’ve just made tea,” she said. Biscuits waited on a plate.
~*~
A week later, a letter arrived for Eleanor with a Bristol postmark. The letter inside informed her they had no plans to sell the building at Long Dene, which might at some unspecified point in the future be brought back into use as a paper mill.
She threw the letter on the fire.
When next they walked to the lending library at Northcombe, Eleanor averted her eyes when they crossed the narrow field.
If, from time to time, she caught a glimpse of black along the path, Eleanor declined it any interest or attention. She looked the other way.
The White Otter
Amanda Hemingway
This is the story of something which happened to some friends of mine, though I was involved – an accident, an incident, call it what you like: there isn’t really a word that fits. I could say it was something so bizarre, so unnatural, so terrifying as to make your hair stand on end, but it all depends on what you believe really happened, and, of course, what sort of things affect your hair that way. Apart from an excess of gel.
I’ve always had a horror of taxidermy. I can’t understand why people should wish to decorate their homes with dead bodies – ornament or trophy, animal or bird or fish. As a child I was taken to a museum to see an exhibition by that Victorian guy whose name I’ve forgotten, who did those pageants with kittens, all dressed up and posed in a variety of scenarios, like miniature furry humans. The thought of the poor creatures being killed, when they were tiny and helpless – killed very carefully so as not to spoil their looks – then stuffed, dolled up, arranged on their little stages, was so horrible I rushed outside and was violently sick. Okay, I had just eaten four choc ices, but my reaction, I’ve always known, was to the kitty corpses. Stuffed animals have made me feel slightly queasy ever since. Now – well, I’ll get around to that.
Fortunately, you don’t see many of them in Knightsbridge, which is where I have my flat, and the sort of people I hang out with don’t do dead-body decor.
My friend who’s at the centre of this story lives in Sussex, which Stella Gibbons aptly called ‘darkest Sussex’, where anything can happen and often does. We’d been at boarding school together, Sandways, all through our teens; it’s a bond which lasts. Annabel had grown up in the country and came to the big city post-uni to find a job (publishing) and a mate (a choice of losers). After her marriage she’d quit the job and moved back to the kind of rural fastness where she felt most at home. She has unerring bad taste in men, always falling for the over-pretty, little-boy-lost types who desperately need mothering since they are incapable of managing their own lives. Neil Villiers is no exception. Without being precisely effeminate, he’s rather fragile-looking, handsome in an old-fashioned way: he would look appropriate in a Regency sporting print with a long coat, a long gun, a brace of pheasant and a spaniel. He might have been a slightly neurotic Bingley (Annabel adores Pride and Prejudice), only the dominating influence in his life was not Darcy but his father. Gordon Villiers was a self-made multi-millionaire – possibly even a billionaire – who claimed aristocratic connections and lived in a Sussex mansion which had once belonged to the local squire, adopting those aspects of the lifestyle which amused him, bullying his family and generally behaving like the village despot. Gaddafi in a Barbour. His eldest son had had to go to Australia to escape him; of his two daughters, one lived on a beach in Thailand, one in rehab. Neil, the apple of his eye – if such apples are soft at the core and badly bruised – was given, on his marriage, the lodge by the manor gates, so he and his new wife could be part of the cosy family establishment. By the time Annabel realised what she had got herself into, it was too late.
Gordon had made his money in property; Neil, whose financial skills were non-existent, dabbled in antiques. He was a natural dabbler: he had quite a good eye but made a lousy salesman and was far too conscientious for such a cut-throat business. It was he who bought the white otter, declaring it a bargain at £3500. Vintage taxidermy, he assured me, was the coming thing, and the albino otter was very rare, it should fetch a lot of money at the right auction. Meanwhile, it stood in a glass case on the sideboard next to the dining table. I’d gone down for the weekend and there it was, glaring at me all through dinner. This otter didn’t have the mouldy look of most stuffed animals: its coat gleamed as it must have done in life. It was big, too, I estimated well over three feet long, and posed for dramatic effect with a dismembered fish beneath one paw, the other raised, its mouth open in a feral gape and daubed with red paint to simulate blood.
“It’s got fangs,” I said. “It’s got fangs like a vampire. Otters aren’t supposed to have fangs – are they?”
“Must do,” Neil said happily.
“It was a good buy,” Annabel insisted, ever loyal. “I’m sure Neil’s right: he’ll get lots of money for it.”
“How can you have it in the house?” I said. “It totally creeps me out.”
“It may have come from round here,” Neil pursued, as if the notion might reassure me. “I got it at a clearance sale after this chap died, over in Pebworth. Dad says there were stories about a white otter down by the river when he was a boy. He thinks his grandfather might have shot it.” It was not a fact Gordon Villiers wanted to boast about, but his grandparent had apparently been a gamekeeper, or possibly a poacher, on the estate he now owned.
“Why would they shoot it?” I asked, dimly aware of potential conservation issues.
“Could ruin the trout fishing,” Neil said, slightly shocked I didn’t get it. “Honestly, Caroline –!”
“I like animals alive,” I said. I’m not, in general, an animal person – having to scoop up doggy poop is only marginally less disgusting than leaving it for people to tread in – but I get on with other people’s pets, since the owners do the yukky part. I was stroking Beth, Neil’s chocolate Lab, under the table, unobtrusively feeding her roast potatoes since they’re bad for my figure. Annabel is a wonderful cook. It’s disastrous.
Beth was short for Beth Gelert, the hound in the
famous poem, whose master slew him when he returned from the hunt to find the dog covered in blood and the baby missing. Too late, the baby turned up safe and they dragged a dead wolf from under the sofa. Neil’s chocolate Lab was actually a bitch, named owing to a misunderstanding: he thought Beth was short for Elizabeth. He was like that: sweet, but hopeless.
Beth the Lab had been intended for a gun dog but had turned out completely incompetent since she was terrified of bangs and bolted home every time a shotgun went off. Gordon poured derision on both her and her master for this, but that’s what he was like.
The otter had somehow taken possession of my imagination. That night, I dreamed about it. I saw it dislodging the lid from the display case and climbing out, padding up the stairs to my room like a soft-footed ghost. I woke, and thought I heard the pattering of paws in the passage outside, and something sniffing at my door. Of course, it was Beth, only Beth, but I couldn’t bring myself to get up and open the door, I pulled the quilt up to my neck and shivered until the sniffing stopped, or the dream retreated, or the fantasy faded away.
In the morning, I told Annabel, who laughed and laughed.
“Really, Caro,” she said, “I didn’t think you were the nervous type. I expect it was just a nightmare. You can’t have heard Beth: she was shut in our room.”
By daylight, I wasn’t entirely sure what I had or hadn’t heard, so I let it go.
“Anyway,” Annabel said, “Neil will’ve sold it before you come down again. No more bad dreams.”
In the end, I didn’t go back until New Year, more than three months later. I’d been skiing over Christmas and decided I’d burned up enough calories to justify the indulgence of Annabel’s cooking, and besides, after the full-on glamourfest of St Moritz every day I felt the urge for a little restful country rustication. Annabel and I had spoken regularly on the phone, so I knew the situation with Neil and his father was deteriorating. She was desperate for them to move away from the dreaded paternal influence, but of course Neil had no money of his own, nor the means of earning any, and was dependant on Gordon’s every whim. Annabel wanted children, but refused to bring them up in such a warped environment, which was causing trouble between her and her husband. The latter maintained his father was simply a ‘forceful personality’ who ‘liked his own way’, rather than a mad dictator and mental sadist. Annabel was looking for another job but there was little available in the area and in these days of recession she couldn’t find any position with a salary that would cover their needs.
“I love Neil,” she said tragically. “I don’t want to leave him, but…”
“Of course you mustn’t leave him,” I said, shocked. His predecessors had included a wannabe writer with permanent block and a failed circus performer. God knew what she might come up with next. “How old is Gordon?”
“Barely seventy,” Annabel said, becoming even more tragic. “Tough as Sandways suet. He’ll live forever.”
“Bugger.”
I was so distracted during that last phone call I forgot to ask if Neil had sold it. The otter. Naturally he hadn’t. I arrived and there it was, poised in the same demi-pounce on the trout, looking somehow whiter and glossier than ever, almost as if it was… well-fed. And there seemed to be more blood round its mouth…
“Oh yes, Neil did that,” Annabel said blithely. “He thought it needed a re-touch. He put it in an auction, but it didn’t make the reserve. The auction wasn’t a big enough one: the serious collectors weren’t there.”
“Give it away,” I said. “Get rid of it. Bury it.”
“You really have a thing about it, don’t you?” Annabel looked baffled. “It’s harmless, Caro.”
“It’s dead. Would you keep an Egyptian mummy in the house? In scientific terms, that’s harmless too.”
That night, Gordon came to dinner, with Neil’s mother, Melanie, a meek, shrinking woman who had obviously spent her whole life scampering after her husband like a mouse after a very big cheese, probably having the sort of sex that Ian McEwan wrote about in On Chesil Beach. She was wearing fake Ungaro and flinched every time Gordon sniped at her. He greeted me with enthusiasm, the kind that has undercurrents. We’d met twice before, though only briefly; on this occasion, he’d clearly decided to use me to score off both wife and daughter-in-law, bulldozing me into a dinner-table flirtation, pointing up my London glamour and even my job (PR) in an attempt to make both women look countrified and ineffectual. Under his thumb, their opportunities must be strictly limited, so the comparison was odorous. I wasn’t playing ball but even when I complimented her on the Ungaro Melanie glowered as if everything was my fault.
“And,” I added, having seconds of a divine cassoulet, “Annabel’s food is absolutely gorgeous. I can’t cook to save my life. Last time I had people round I got everything from M&S.”
“Perhaps that’s why you’re so slim,” said Gordon, doing jovial and nasty in one go. “Bel here seems to be getting a bit porky. Too much nibbling on her own dishes. She’ll have to watch out Neil doesn’t start looking elsewhere, haha!”
Annabel’s always been slightly plump: it suits her. I kicked Neil under the table.
“I l-like curvy women,” he stammered. Thirty-one years old, and still stammered when he tried to answer his father back. But he’d probably pooed his nappy at Daddy’s first sneer, and had never really moved on from that.
Gordon ignored him. “It’s nice to have such a stunning woman around,” he said, grinning wolfishly at me. “Makes a pleasant change. Are you staying for the shoot on Monday?”
I was caught off-guard. “I hate guns…”
“Nonsense, girl. Real women like guns: they’re sexy. You’re a real woman – a woman and a half, I’ll bet. I’ll teach you: don’t you worry.”
“I don’t like killing things!” Inadvertently, my glance flicked to the white otter.
Gordon followed my gaze while paying no attention to what I said. He was the sort of person who dismissed out-of-hand any remarks that didn’t accord with his world-view. “Amazing, isn’t it? My grandfather shot him, you know. I remember hearing stories about that otter when I was a boy: they called him the Ghost, said he was as cunning as a snake and as mean as a wolf and quicker than any hound. The trout along our river are so big, there was even a rumour he was the devil himself come to dine off them. But my grandfather got him. Did a great job, that taxidermist. Looks like he only died yesterday, doesn’t it? Ought to be worth ten grand. ‘Course, my stupid son can’t even sell it. Neil couldn’t sell the crown jewels to a king on coronation day!”
“He’ll sell it soon,” Annabel said. “He just has to find the right venue.”
“I wouldn’t have it if you paid me,” I said. “It’s creepy.”
“Silly girl.” Gordon was doing indulgent to me now. “You spend too much time with London pansies. Come along on Monday and I’ll show you some real sport – for real men.”
Like shooting a load of helpless birds who can’t shoot back, I thought.
“And,” said Gordon, catching sight of Beth slipping under a chair (she always avoided him), “for God’s sake, Neil, don’t let that damn dog out. Of all the pathetic bitches… Surrounded by them, ain’t I? We’ll take Reggie and Ronnie tomorrow; they’re good gun-dogs. You come along, Caroline: I’ll show you what to do.”
I’m leaving, I thought. I’m leaving Monday morning without fail. If there isn’t a train I’ll walk to London, but I’m never going to touch a gun or try and kill anything, ever. Except perhaps Gordon himself, since the world would obviously be better off without him…
In due course, Gordon and Melanie walked home across the park. I said polite goodnights and vented my impolite feelings to Annabel while Neil went gloomily to bed.
“You’re a clever cook,” I said. “Can’t you poison him?”
“I wish,” she sighed, wistfully. “Neil loves him, you know. That’s the awful part. I suppose you can’t help loving your parents, no matter how they behave. And Neil’s
a loving sort of person.”
I didn’t comment.
I was still tired after skiing and thanks to Neil’s lavishness with the wine I fell asleep quickly. The dream came again. Paws on the stairs, pitter-pat, pitter-pat, and then I woke, I know I woke – I was conscious, rigid with terror, hearing the faint sound of sniffing along the base of my door… Long after it ceased, I must have gone to sleep again.
In the morning, I asked Annabel: “Was Beth in your room last night?”
“Of course. She always is.”
I didn’t mention the nightmare, not this time. Maybe it was all in my head.
We spent New Year’s Eve at a party in the village. There were enough people for me to keep Gordon at a safe distance while I flirted indiscriminately with several men. Neil got drunk and Annabel and I took him home in the small hours, put him to bed, and sat up talking till past four. I almost forgot about the otter. That night, I slept without dreams.
The next morning Neil set off early for the shoot, looking only slightly the worse for wear. I packed, and Annabel drove me to the station. The trains were few, but they were running: I could return to civilisation.
It was a dreary sort of day, not crisp and frosty like it should have been but with a damp, grey chill in the air that ate into your bones. A day to be in London, with traffic and lights and people getting between you and the weather. A day to be in a living room with a big fake fire, or a coffee bar, or a pub. A day to watch television. I got home, made the coffee, switched on the TV. Put Gordon Villiers and stuffed otters and all Annabel’s troubles out of my mind.
About an hour later, my phone rang. Annabel.
“Caro? Oh Caro…”
~*~
I got a taxi to Sussex, even though it was horribly expensive, because I needed to get there fast. I was talking to Annabel en route, but she was sobbing so much it took me a while to work out exactly what had happened. They’d insisted on putting Beth down immediately. Annabel couldn’t stop crying about it, she said she’d held her, looked into her eyes, those big brown Labrador eyes all affection and loyalty, until the soul went out of them for good. (I thought of feeding her roast potatoes under the table, dear soppy Beth who was afraid of guns.) Neil was upstairs crying for his dog, for his father, his wife didn’t know which and probably nor did he. The doctor had given Melanie a sedative but Annabel wouldn’t take anything, someone had to stay with it and try to sort things out. The police had sent the body for autopsy but they said the cause of death was clear. Gordon’s throat was torn out…
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