by Peter Helton
With no engine running the sudden noise reduction made me aware of the many sounds that are drowned by motorized transport: the rushing of the stream over its stony bed; the dripping of moisture from the fog-laden trees; the odd dispirited moan of a sheep or lowing of a cow in the distance; the squelching of water inside my boots and the growling of my stomach. I stomped along what was now just a muddy track, though the water-filled ruts showed that cars did come down here. The track lost the stream after a while and the trees were thinning out. It became even quieter. Another fifty yards and the track widened into a rutted quagmire. Bits of assorted fencing were ineffectually leaning this way and that. What had once been a wooden five-bar gate was mouldering in the weeds. Asquare sign tied with garden twine to the one surviving and otherwise unoccupied gatepost read PRIVATE KEEP OUT. A smaller, handwritten sign underneath proclaimed DANGER, POISONOUS PLANTS. This just had to be the entrance to Grumpy Hollow. Here the land fell away to a shallow bowl into which the mist had settled – or was this where they made the stuff? – and out of it rose solitary trees and the roofs of various structures. This then was Stone’s herb farm, although ‘farm’ seemed too grand a word for such a ramshackle affair. I couldn’t see a living soul. It was far too foggy and boggy and wet. I was hungry and thirsty. And wet and muddy. And just how poisonous were these plants anyway? I took a few unenthusiastic steps through what remained of the gate and sniffed the stagnant air. Something came flying out of the gloom. It missed my head by a few inches and slammed into the mud somewhere behind me. I turned around to see what it might have been when another missile sailed past, close enough for me to feel the air move. I looked all round but in the gloom and mist couldn’t see anyone. A scarecrow poked its unmoving head out of the mist, there were muckheaps, water tanks, sheds and all sorts. Another missile landed near me. ‘Hey, stop that!’ I protested ineffectively in a to-whom-it-may-concern fashion. Ineffectively, since the next missile hit me squarely on the right knee. ‘Ow! All right already, I get the message!’ Rubbing my knee with one hand and waving the other in surrender I hobbled back through the gate. A last vindictive missile landed near me. I picked it up. It was a small apple. Not exactly lethal but a hard enough object when thrown with enough force. When I got back to the ford I washed the mud off it and took a bite. Not only was it hard enough to threaten my dental work but it was so sour it made me shudder. My assailant hadn’t wasted any dessert apples on me. I spat it out, plonked the helmet back on my head and for five minutes worked up a sweat pumping the kick-starter on the Norton. When it finally fired up I thought it a very cheerful sound. This time I managed to cross the stream without drowning the engine and I rode out of the valley before the fog could swallow me up.
Chapter Nine
A good cook always starts by putting the kettle on. Anyone hoping to be a good cook should also first grapple with mud-encrusted laces, drop squelching boots in the hall, hang leather jacket over a chair near the stove, stuff wet and filthy jeans into the washing machine, divest himself of any remaining items of clothing, letting them drop to the floor en route to the bathroom, then stand under a hot and generous shower groaning and spluttering until the General Decrepitude Index sinks back to acceptable levels. Next, dry off leisurely in a warm and draught-free room. Clothing self in comfortable and well-cut attire, freshly laundered and ironed, preferably by someone else, nicely rounds off the process. Now fully restored, cook should reenter the steamy kitchen where by now the kettle has boiled completely dry and sits crackling and growling like an evil thing on the stove.
A good cook refills white-hot kettle at the sink, accompanied by much banging and steam, yet a minimum of burns and swearing, then returns it to the heat. A good cook is now ready for a drink. More than ready.
From the kitchen window I could see that up in the studio the lights were on, which probably meant that Annis was still whirling about there. The sitting room, I noticed with relief, was as messy as ever. I banked up the fire and went to tackle the current famine.
Something simple. I quickly chopped an onion, a few sticks of celery and a red pepper, chucked them in a pot and covered them with a ladle of stock. While that was bubbling I furnished myself with a bottle of Pilsner Urquell; my Existential Fear Factor responded nicely by dropping a few notches. My Accumulated Guilt Quotient on the other hand remained dangerously high. It had hardly been an afternoon of great achievements. My riding about in Lam Valley had been little more than a diversion. It had certainly contributed nothing towards freeing Jill’s son and I had dug up no great revelations concerning Dead Guy Albert in the back of my DS. That there was some despair amongst farmers after BSE and the disastrously handled Foot and Mouth ‘crisis’ was hardly news to me either. Jack Fryer’s kitchen had given a fair impression of a pit of despair but unless Albert turned out to be an employee of the Rural Payments Agency I couldn’t see any connection. Yet I had no choice. I had to find an explanation of how the body got into my car. I couldn’t help Jill while in police custody.
Grumpy Hollow had been more of a surprise. It had probably just been local kids, feeling safely hidden in the mist, taking a few pot shots at a stranger. Either that or the Stone woman was the silent violent type. Yet since I’d clearly been trespassing, a few well-aimed apples lobbed through the mist wasn’t exactly a disproportionate reaction either. Airborne fruit or not, I would have to go back there. Preferably on a day when I could see it coming.
The stock had reduced by now so I added chopped tomatoes, tomato purée, a pinch of sugar and some torn basil leaves from a plant that clung to life in a pot on the windowsill. I seasoned the sauce and left it to simmer while I put on the water for the pasta.
As for getting some paintings done . . . I tried not to think about it. The only time I didn’t feel guilty about not painting enough was while I was painting. Our forthcoming burglary worried me. Tim had assured me that he had a plan and everything would work just fine. Although I had been known to climb through the odd window and could if necessary open a door with picklocks – as long as I remembered to bring sandwiches and had no other engagements that day – I had come to rely heavily on Tim’s expertise in that area. It wasn’t so much the break-in itself but the consequences that worried me. Not that I had the least fear that we might get trouble from the law. If Telfer, after discovering the burglary, called the police at all then the statistics said we had a pretty good chance of never getting fingered for it. It was more Telfer’s reaction I was worried about. That and what we might find.
The water in the big pan was seething. I poured in half a packet of conchiglie pasta shells, stirred a drained can of tuna and some capers into the sauce and went to fetch Annis. The path our feet had carved through the meadow over the years was slippery and the mist lay thick and unmoving in our valley. The grass was too high again, I noticed as it brushed against my legs, and would soon need its last cut of the year. There was no sign of Annis in the studio. The door was open – neither of us ever remembered to lock it – and the daylight bulbs were on, but not a soul inside. The painting on her easel looked good. It also looked finished, though Annis would probably find a million minute things to change before she was happy with it. She’d dropped a brush in front of the easel. I picked it up, wiped it and dropped it into a jar of white spirit. There was nothing curious about any of this, I told myself as I turned out the light and closed the door behind me. We sometimes forgot to switch the lights off or simply didn’t go back up to the studio when we had thought we would. Yet I had been so convinced that she was busy painting that I felt a little unnerved at not finding her there. I slithered back to the house and climbed the stairs to her room. Perhaps she had fallen asleep. I slowly and quietly opened her door. The bedside lamp was on, lending the room a warm amber glow. Propped up on her pillows Annis was lying naked on the bed, looking up at me with large green eyes and chewing on her lower lip. Beside her Tim’s naked form was asleep, his woolly head on her stomach, one hand resting on her breast. There were emp
ty takeaway cartons on the floor. The room smelled of Chinese food, of cigarettes and wine and lovemaking.
‘Sorry,’ I said quietly.
‘Sorry,’ Annis mouthed silently and crinkled her forehead with worry lines.
I closed the door gently, then clomped down the stairs to the kitchen. I grabbed the bottle of Urquell, emptied it, opened another from the fridge. I lit a cigarette and puffed at it, standing by the stove, looking at nothing in particular.
This had never happened before. The triangle that was Tim, Annis and myself had lasted for . . . was it three years already? But we had been what I liked to think of as discreet about it. Annis lived with me but from time to time stayed the night at Tim’s place. No one counted the nights and we never talked about it. Normally Annis and I slept in my large bedroom with the big windows at the front; only when Tim stayed over did she sleep in her own room and Tim on a sofa downstairs . . . We had never discussed this, yet an unspoken rule had just been broken. Only, when I thought about it, this seemed rather petty. A ‘not under this roof’ rule could surely only be there so I might conveniently forget that I was sharing Annis’s sexual favours with Tim and had done so right from the start. Then why was I so . . . I was looking for the right word and was surprised when I found it . . . bloody upset about it?
Behind me Annis padded barefoot into the kitchen. I didn’t turn around. Listened to her light a cigarette from the packet on the table and inhale. ‘You want to talk?’ she asked quietly.
I turned round then. She was wearing jeans, a crumpled black T-shirt and electrified hair. ‘What’s to talk about?’
She sat down at the table. ‘Then why make me feel like I’ve done something really bad? You’re unhappy, so let’s talk about it.’
‘No, it’s just . . .it’s just it never happened before. I thought you and Tim wouldn’t . . . I don’t know. Where’s his bloody car?’
‘He’d been drinking, came by cab.’
‘But you don’t normally . . .’ I stubbed out the cigarette and fumbled for another one.
‘Sleep with him here? Not usually, no. It just happened like that today.’
Having got the cigarette lit I sucked hard on it, then nearly choked on the smoke trying to talk through it. ‘And it was really important that you . . . shagged him this minute? It couldn’t have waited? I didn’t know things between you were so passionate, so urgent.’
‘It wasn’t like that, Chris. Tim was feeling down, he wanted to see me. He said he needed me and I told him to come over.’
‘So next time you’re at his place and I’m down and I need you you’re going to invite me round Tim’s for a shag while he’s out getting you a takeaway, is that it?’
‘No, of course not, but then it would never happen anyway.’ She twirled the glass ashtray around in front of her with a sudden, sharp movement.
‘What? What wouldn’t?’
‘You calling me and saying you need me.’
I was confounded by this. ‘But I do need you.’
‘Do you.’ It wasn’t a question, it was a flat statement of doubt.
‘Of course I need you, I love you,’ I protested.
Annis smoked silently for a while and chased a spent match round the ashtray with her cigarette. ‘You never said.’
‘What do you mean, of course I did, I must have done, I mean . . . Didn’t I?’ I sank into a chair opposite her.
‘Believe me, Chris, I’d remember.’
‘But you know, don’t you? You do know I love you.’
She seemed to think about it for a moment. She looked sad all of a sudden, and tired. She gave a tiny shrug. ‘I know you’re fond of me, I mean we’ve lived here together for years now and . . . But then we lived here for two years before we ever slept with each other. And if it hadn’t been for me climbing into the bath with you we probably never would have. And you didn’t object when you found out I was sleeping with Tim then.’
‘That’s hardly fair, I think your exact words were, “If you two are going to make a big deal out of this I won’t sleep with either of you again,” so what did you expect us to do? Specifically what was I supposed to do that I didn’t?’
‘I don’t know. But whatever it was you didn’t do it.’
‘We’d only just started going to bed together, I didn’t know then that . . . how . . . I was going to feel about you later, how could I, and then everything seemed to run along fine. It was you who made the rules, anyway. Tim and I had no say in it. You decided.’
‘You didn’t have to accept it, Chris. If I told you to jump in the mill race you wouldn’t do that.’ In a quieter tone she said: ‘Tim finds it hard. Tim always found it hard to share me. And you think it’s all on my terms but I find it hard to share me sometimes. This isn’t normal, you know, what we’re doing.’
‘You started it.’
‘Will you stop saying that? As though it made any difference! It’s got nothing to do with what’s happening now!’
‘What is happening now?’ I was suddenly scared. I was more scared than I had been for a long time.
‘I don’t know that anything is. Perhaps there should be, I really don’t know. You’re the grown-up. You’re nearly twice my age, I always thought you’d know all this stuff. I didn’t plan this, I didn’t go out of my way to create this kind of life for myself, it just happened and it happened because I was here and you were here. Getting it on with both you and Tim was just me in a weird mood then. I never thought about it for the long term, I never thought it through at all. As you said, it had only just started. And I didn’t do it so you could fight about me, either. But neither of you did, you just seemed to think it was all right that we had this triangle. It seemed quite hip, somehow, I was impressed. With myself as well.’
‘And now?’
‘I keep telling you, I don’t know. Your supper’s burning, I think.’
At that moment I could smell it too. I shot up out of my chair and pushed the pots off the heat. The pasta was just boiling dry and the sauce was nothing but a sizzling dribble at the bottom of the pan. This was becoming a habit.
I turned to Annis who was already at the door. She paused. ‘When did you first realize?’
‘What?’
‘That you loved me?’
I thought back, trying to remember.
Annis slipped out of the door.
Chapter Ten
There was no sign of Tim next day when I carefully carried my hangover downstairs, in the middle of the morning, following the smell of coffee into the kitchen. I lowered myself slowly on to a chair. Annis was there at the stove, insinuating long strips of bacon into a pan of sizzling oil.
‘Want some?’ she asked. ‘Speak now or forever hold your peace.’
‘No thanks, I’m feeling a bit . . . delicate. Where’s that coffee I can smell?’
She poured me a mug from the cafetière and shoved it in front of me, then unsuccessfully tried to run her hand through my tangled hair.
‘Is your hair part of the Make Space for Wildlife initiative?’
‘My hair hurts, I can’t possibly brush it.’
‘I thought Pilsner didn’t give you a hangover?’
‘It does if you try and drink all of it.’
‘Ah.’ She rummaged around in a drawer and found a squashed carton of painkillers. So that’s where they lived. She doled out two pills into my eager hand. ‘Eejit.’
I looked round the kitchen. Annis followed my gaze in silent triumph. The place was spotless and sparkled, despite the gloom of the day. She hadn’t just cleaned the place, she had burnished it.
‘Talking of filth . . .’ I told Annis my muddy tale while she sat down and attacked a couple of eggs, a mountain of fried mushrooms and a pile of crispy bacon. ‘Is that breakfast?’ I asked.
