by David Mark
I was busy with teacups and drying spoons. It took me a second to pay attention.
‘Harper, is it?’ I asked. Harper was an Irish mason with a premises a few miles away at Bewcastle. He had more work than he needed but it was hard to begrudge him. He was always full of laughs and tales. Fairfax was always fond of him.
‘Aye, Ronan Harper. Came over to build the base and nivver left.’ He rubbed his big broad chin. ‘The Kinmont solicitor’s had a call. Said the money were there to fix the place up. It’ll have to wait until the weather clears, like.’
Cordelia’s eyes burned into my back. I felt like a translator.
‘Kinmont tomb was the one got taken out by the tree,’ I said. ‘There’s only one Kinmont left and he lives away so local matters are handled by his solicitor. He’ll be relieved, no doubt. Last time he came up it had no happy memories for him. Said flat out he wouldn’t want to be buried in the thing. Got a life in Oxford, so I hear. Left the village before the war so it’s no loss.’
‘And somebody’s paying to have it fixed?’ asked Cordelia, quietly.
‘Aye, somebody with a big heart and big pockets. Said it was wrong to have him or the church pay out for what were an act of God. I were hoping to get a name out of him but he had to be off and I only lets myself have one pint after work. I likes to be home. Felicity and my fireside, that’ll do for me.’
Cordelia’s lips had become a line. She was staring at the floor like there were a stain on it.
‘Chivers aint been up to you yet,’ said John, cigarette hanging at his lip and his hands on the edges of his chair. ‘Man’s an imbecile.’
I’d never heard him say ‘imbecile’ before. He might have been trying to impress.
‘I’m not sure I’ve much to tell him,’ said Cordelia. She looked at me enquiringly, daring to be contradicted. Was it a test? What did she want me to say?
‘He won’t put no more hours in than he needs to,’ said John. ‘Not exactly Sherlock Holmes. And it all seems pretty straightforward about poor Fairfax. There’ll be an inquest right enough but that’ll be open and shut. You’re as well to stay out of it. Felicity’s said she’ll make a statement but what’s it going to say? He left in a rainstorm and never came back? Doubt that will be much help.’
I stayed where I was, facing away from them both, watching her in the reflected surface of the window. She seemed to be struggling with herself. Looked like she was having a fight inside.
‘There were all sorts of funny stuff in his house,’ I said, and it was out before I could stop it. I suddenly heard myself speaking. Opening up. And it felt like I were getting lighter as I did so.
‘Funny stuff?’ asked Cordelia and John, as one.
‘You know he liked writing. Well it were no secret he’d scribbled all these stories down and had most of the village’s memories on paper. But I had no idea how hard he’d worked at it. Honest to God there were boxes and boxes full of scribblings and gibberish. No system to it. Just chaos. I’m good with handwriting and I could barely make much sense of it but it was like he had the whole village’s thoughts pinned down on paper. And Keith’s wife Pat said he had one of those recording things. I’ve nivver seen him with that, have you, John?’
Cordelia whipped her head in my direction. ‘A recording device? Like a Dictaphone?’
‘If that’s what you call them. I never seen him with one. John?’
John shrugged one shoulder. ‘He liked his toys. I mebs thought it were a music machine. I’ll ask. Graffoe’s into all that lot.’
‘Graffoe?’
‘Sorry love, friend of mine. Gives me my lift in. He knows about that stuff.’
‘Did he know Fairfax.’
‘Doubt it. Can’t see as how they’d have crossed paths.’
Cordelia looked angry now, as if she couldn’t work out how the conversation was supposed to flow.
‘John works in Carlisle,’ I said, filling in the gaps. ‘Plumber for the council. Graffoe comes in daily from Haltwhistle and picks John up on the main road. You might know his car. Passes you daily.’
She didn’t seem any less tense. Just sat, waiting for more.
‘Aye, well, mebs it’s no help,’ said John, a little sniffily. ‘What were you wanting our Felicity for any road?’
I passed her a cup of tea, complete with saucer. She took it without a word. She looked at its surface as if reading the leaves.
‘I was up at the camp today,’ she said, suddenly. ‘By the castle. Mr Nixon told me about its history and I suddenly wanted to see it. A man called Loz picked me up. We talked. I wanted to tell Felicity what we spoke about.’
For a moment the only sound in the kitchen was the shifting of coals in the stove and the soft rhythm of rain on glass. Then John cleared his throat and extinguished his cigarette.
‘Spit it out then, love,’ he said, sitting forward. He would normally be reading the paper at that time. He was going to be entertained come what might.
‘I tells John everything any way,’ I said, and at the time, it was still true.
We waited for longer than was comfortable. Then she told us. Told us about the man Loz had seen and spoken to and sent to Fairfax’s house. A man in a blue suit with a recording device and a canvas bag. He’d seen somebody he recognized and wanted to be sure. Wanted to know so badly that he went straight to a stranger’s door.
I left it a moment after she finished. Wanted to give John his chance to say something. But he never. It were me as spoke.
‘I found a page of writing paper in the church,’ I said, quietly. ‘Under a stone, in a locked box. There were footprints in the dust. It looked like somebody had tried to burn it. Just a page. Why would he do that? Why keep it there then make it so easy to see where it might be?’
Cordelia played with the collar of her jumper, pulling the moist material away from her skin. There were newspapers beside her on the sofa and she scanned the headlines as she thought. I remember seeing her eyes as being like a blur but I probably imagined that. Doesn’t make it any less real.
‘If he knew who the man in blue was …’ she said, softly.
‘He might just have had the time to move him. To move him and grab whatever else was in the floor.’
I looked at John. He seemed energized now, his thoughts keeping pace with Cordelia’s.
‘He looked startled,’ said Cordelia, glancing at me. ‘Think about it. When you told him what we’d seen there was a look on his face and then he went straight back out the door …’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, shaking my head.
‘He could have moved the man we saw. Could have grabbed whatever he had hidden. That might be what caused the accident. He might have been so shaken up …’
‘He might have lost control of the car.’
‘Or he might have been to see whoever shared his secret,’ finished Cordelia. She and John looked at one another, half-smiling, faces flushed. I felt like the outsider. Felt like a silly woman in an apron with the smell of potatoes and gravy on my hands.
‘Fairfax were as good a man as I’ve known,’ I said, refusing to believe it.
‘This doesn’t mean he weren’t. We don’t know anything,’ said Cordelia. ‘But we have to ask questions. This place,’ she muttered, frustrated, ‘it’s got something in the earth. It’s seen so much blood and misery. People do things they might not want to. We’re not all wicked. Sometimes it’s just circumstances.’
They looked at me as if I were both their mams; as if they needed me to acknowledge what was being said before we could move forward.
‘Here,’ I said, at last, and I pulled the burnt paper from my apron. It was folded across the middle and some of the words were illegible but there was no mistaking Fairfax’s handwriting or the smell of burning that marbled the air as Cordelia unfolded it.
‘Can I?’ asked John, and he pulled himself out of his chair and sat down beside Cordelia, squashing the newspapers. Their knees touched. Their shoulders touched. I swear
it were all I could do not to stick a knife between them and pull them apart like frozen sausages.
John’s lips moved as he read. Cordelia’s didn’t. She finished first. They looked at me together.
‘We should just tell Chivers,’ I said, in a last desperate attempt to jump off whatever road we were on.
‘We will,’ said Cordelia. ‘But not until we have something to tell him. Felicity, there’s something here. Some secrets that need to be dug up. Fairfax is dead and I know it’s to do with what we glimpsed when the tree came down. It has something to do with the war. With this Frenchman. A boy on a car bonnet. We need to know more. Can you look through his boxes? Get us into the church again? And John, you need to find out who’s paying for the restoration work …’
I turned my back on them but couldn’t help staring; staring through my own silly reflection as my husband and my new friend talked about how to find whichever one of my friends or family had put a well-dressed Frenchman in a tomb and closed the door.
CORDELIA
The words on the burnt paper stayed with me all night. I left Felicity’s just before nine p.m. and resisted John’s persistent offer to walk me home. I wanted to think. Wanted to feel rain on my face and cold air on my cheeks and see if the hunter’s moon would be red or blue. I never found out. The sky was too clogged with grey to offer a view of any lunar spectacle and in truth, the rain and the cold produced little in the way of sensory pleasure. I just ended up sniffly and damp. Two cars passed me on the way back up the hill. Neither one slowed down. The village seemed even quieter than usual as I trudged past the old vicarage, already beginning to go to seed, and past the Bridge Inn. The place was silent. No clinking glasses, no muffled songs or mumbled back-and-forth. Left, past the garage with its fleet of buses standing idle at the kerbside; their paintwork gleaming with a gloss of raindrops. Round past the church. The new church. Pretty little place built on a slope: a curve of old graves around the entrance and long, straggly grass and weeds. Newer headstones further away from the door – smaller, whiter, sadder. Children. Babies from the hospital on the hill.
I didn’t let myself linger there. The headstones were teeth, waiting to take a bite out of a part of me that was starting to come back to life. I quickened my pace. Up past the big old houses. Slender trees to my right; an inadequate fence for the miles and miles of green that stretched away to my right. Up to the hospital. The locals still called it that. It had been a convalescent home for nigh-on twenty years but during the war it had been taken on by the authorities as a safe haven where expectant mothers from bigger cities in the north east could come and give birth without fear of any bombs dropping. Close to 5,000 women did just that. Those that didn’t survive were buried, quietly, in the grounds of the new church: another layer on the endless strata of bones and blood upon which the whole vale seemed to have been constructed.
Work was going on at the spa. There was talk of it becoming a hotel. It was certainly a splendid old building; a colossal white edifice that would have looked more at home on the seafront at Brighton or Scarborough than in that little wooded area by the river. I barely looked up as I passed. I slouched my way down into the damp woods and slithered down the muddy footpath; the smell of the sulphurous water mingling with the scent of churned mud and mulched leaves. The river was raging. It took an effort of will to force myself over the bridge, placing my feet carefully on the wooden slats. Rain splattered hard and heavy on the few leaves that the autumn had not stolen and I squinted in almost total blackness as I dragged myself up the footpath on the far bank towards home. Was I afraid? I don’t think I was, no. The worst thing I could imagine had already happened to me. There was nothing more fearsome in the darkness of the wood than there was within the shadows of myself.
For the first time since Stefan died I felt almost pleased to be home. The house looked as it always did – old and sturdy and totally wrong for me. It was too symmetrical – too splendid. I wanted chaos. Mess. I wanted patterned wallpaper hung upside down. I wanted floral curtains and polka-dot drapes. I could have had it, if I’d asked. But I think I preferred wanting it than having it. However it looked, I was pleased to see it that night. Happy to push open the back door and bathe myself in light. I drank a measure of sloe gin then poured another into a mug of boiling water. Went to the library and pulled a book at random from the shelves. I couldn’t concentrate on the words. Every time I tried to focus I would again see the burnt paper and Fairfax’s scribbled words and my vision would fill with images of frightened men and women herded like cattle and a young boy draped across a Nazi vehicle like a stag.
I woke where I was; stiff and cold in a high-backed chair. I don’t know if I dreamed but when I opened my eyes I was glad to have left wherever I had just been. I was cold to the marrow. My clothes had dried to my skin and the moisture from them had seeped into my bones. I stripped and wrapped myself in a blanket while I waited for the water to heat up then ran a bath. There was only enough hot water for a couple of inches but it still felt good to ease myself over the lip of the white, wrought-iron tub and scrub the goose pimples from my skin. I washed my hair and shaved my legs and lay with a hot flannel over my eyes until the water began to grow cold. I felt better for it. The towels I used to rub myself dry were rougher than I would have wished but I had not really got the hang of doing the laundry. I brushed my hair for a while, sitting at a dressing table in one of the spare rooms and looking at myself in the burnished surface of an old Victorian mirror. Where had he found all this stuff? Who was it for? Did he know me at all? I tried not to think upon it. My marriage was not meant to be a union of souls. It was an arrangement – a solution. I was grateful to him for all he had done but there were times I felt I would have been better scratching a living by myself than trusting my whole future to the charity of a man who only needed me in his life as camouflage. If I dwelled too long upon such thoughts I grew angry. Angry at myself for being so dependent; angry at my body for making a lie of my promises to Stefan’s father. I hadn’t expected to get pregnant. Hadn’t thought my body could so blatantly disregard my wishes.
It was just after ten the next morning when I finally headed back the way I had come. Out the door, down the hill, over the swollen river. When I had first arrived I had been told to turn left at the riverbank and make my way to the Popping Stone. It was a local landmark: three rounded boulders beside the river and a popular place for courtships over the years. The poet Sir Walter Scott proposed to his sweetheart there, though local legend had it that he only did so out of spite towards a previous lover who had turned him down. He had made her a promise he would find a new object for his affections before the year was out. The spot was as popular with locals as with tourists who all put great stock in the sulphurous water’s healing powers. Several bottles of gunpowder-scented water had been left on my doorstep during my time in the village though I had barely taken more than a sip. It tasted of rotten eggs and while it may have offered long life to those who imbibed, none of the stooped, gnarled old folk who shuffled around Gilsland looked as though they were gaining much from the experience.
It took twenty minutes to reach Felicity’s. The rain had eased off but the air was still wet and the sky had the look of uncooked bread. I saw two women at the bus stop and said hello to a man I half recognized outside the post office. He seemed a little taken aback but knuckled his flat cap as if I was somebody important. It was all I could do not to curtsey in return.
There was no answer at Felicity’s so I presumed she had already made her way to Fairfax’s. I crossed the road and peered in at the kitchen window. Felicity was on her knees, surrounded by papers, like a mug on an elaborate doily. I was cautious with my knock on the window but she still jumped like a teenager caught looking at a magazine. When she turned to me her face was white; the veins in her neck standing out as if she had just escaped the noose. One hand held to her heart, she gestured me to the back door. I went inside, into chilly air that smelled like forgotten fruit
and liniment.
‘Gave me a start,’ said Felicity. She seemed as cool as the room; her whole manner stiff.
‘I’m always doing that,’ I said, trying to raise a smile.
‘I don’t know if I’m doing any of this right,’ she said, leading me into the kitchen through the passageway. It was quite a nice space, designed like Felicity’s, but the table was made for two, not four, and the pictures on the walls were in better quality frames.
‘He kept it nice,’ I said, taking my coat off. The sofa was also covered in paperwork so I just held it in my hand.
‘Ha!’ said Felicity, sharply. ‘This room maybe. The room for visitors. For me! But you wait until you see the rest of the place. Bloody pigsty.’ She had made herself a space in the centre of the papers and went back to her knees, folding her pleated skirt beneath her backside and holding it there with her slippered feet.
I was surprised to see her angry. She looked pale, as though she were fighting a bout of seasickness. I wondered if she had slept last night. Whether the thought of looking deeper into the dead man had filled her sleep with terrors.
‘Probably too proud to ask for help,’ I said, as softly as I could. ‘How were you to know, eh?’
‘Aye, well,’ said Felicity, and she shifted, painfully. ‘Bloody knees are killing me. Curse in my family. Our bones go to seed after we hit thirty.’
‘It’s temper in mine,’ I said, moving closer to her. She shuffled herself. She looked suddenly like an Arab at prayer.
‘Your mam quick with the stick, is she?’ asked Felicity, turning to me. ‘Mine were a terror. Kind-hearted but knew that she shouldn’t spare the rod. She were right to do it. There’s plenty in the village could still do with a hiding but we’ve all gone soft. I should have given my two a belting years ago.’
I found myself reaching out. I put a hand on her shoulder. Tried to comfort her the way she had done for me. She stiffened under my touch but gave the tiniest nod of thanks.
