by Amanda Craig
‘Are you OK to go on?’
‘Yes, of course.’
She shoots off up the motorway.
‘Slow down, Mum.’
‘I don’t like to think of her waiting,’ she mutters. ‘If she needs a blood transfusion, I’m a match.’
It makes him think, once again, about Dawn. Look at my blood … Perhaps she hadn’t meant what he thought, but during that long drive, he thinks of the one person who might help him to have those dried drops he has kept in his pocket examined.
23
The Recording Angel for West Devon
Wheeling a shrilling trolley round the supermarket, Sally sometimes feels a fool for nodding and smiling at other customers. To them she’s just an odd woman they don’t see, or, if they do, perhaps associate with unwelcome authority. Even so, she recognises them. It gives her a good feeling to see the babies grow up, and even having children of their own – though those who haven’t turned out so well sadden her, because she usually knows why.
‘I feel like the Recording Angel for West Devon, sometimes. I know which children have broken homes, and which are disabled, and all kinds of things which hardly anyone else does. Even with child protection coming out of our ears, there’s so little we can really do to avert the bad stuff,’ she tells Peter. He grunts; nobody had helped him during his own childhood.
‘You only know what parents choose to show you,’ he said, once. ‘All kinds of bad things can go on in a family that social services never see.’
Maybe that’s why he finds it difficult to make friends, she thinks. All their friends are really hers, because she loves company and chatting and getting involved. Of course, she had been blessed with a happy, sociable, supportive family, while he, well, Peter doesn’t expect anyone else to like him. Few would guess that his face is red from shyness as much as harsh weather.
‘If I hadn’t married you, I don’t know what I’d have done,’ he told her once. ‘Probably blown my brains out.’
‘No, you’d have found someone else. There isn’t just one person in the whole world for someone, my dear.’
‘Ah, but there is for me.’
When she thinks of her husband, Sally always feels a mixture of tenderness and sorrow. He is like the great rock on which their home is built, solid and strong, brave in ways that only she knows. She has known him for ever, even before they were married, she can see the little boy he once was and the old man he will become. Yet without a baby, she will feel forever incomplete, as if some vital spring of hope and happiness is choked off.
Of course, Baggage helps – who could look at her beautiful brown eyes and ostrich-plume tail, her creamy chest breaking into waves and her rich brown ears, and not adore her, even if the melting look she gives is inspired by the prospect of a sausage, rather than devotion? A dog is almost as good as a child, and its love more than most humans deserved. In the end, though, you want your own species. Sally has stopped talking about it, because Pete gets angry and upset, but she wishes now she’d insisted on IVF.
I should have not made that vow about obedience, she thinks. Many women didn’t, these days, feeling it to be old-fashioned, but when she got married she’d actually liked the idea. Now, twenty years later, she has come to think differently. She knows, for instance, that the person she was at twenty-two has gone on developing, whereas he has just stopped. He won’t read, as she does, he doesn’t listen to Radio 4, and he barely watches the News because by 10 p.m. they are both in bed and dropping off. Of course, that isn’t the only kind of intelligence that matters. If civilisation came to an end, it’d be Peter and people like him who’d be the most valued members because of their skills. However, that is not the world in which they live, and no matter how ardently Sally longs to admire him in every respect, she knows that she should never have ceded her own authority over herself.
Sally’s trolley squeals past the food bank in Trelorn. She wants to donate to it, Pete doesn’t.
‘They should get off their arses and work,’ he said.
‘You know there’s been more unemployment since the dairy closed.’
‘So why are we using Romanians and Poles, then?’
‘Because they’re young and single and don’t mind sharing three to a room for a few months,’ Sally answered. ‘They aren’t families.’
Pete simply can’t imagine what it’s like. That’s the problem. Unless you’ve seen poverty, and smelt it, and touched it, you can’t imagine the dreariness and hopelessness.
She gives as much fresh food away as she can spare.
‘I just happened to be passing by,’ she’ll say, dropping in on someone she knows to be frail, or in need. She brings fresh eggs or home-made jam, or, in summer, some tomatoes or courgettes or runner beans.
‘You’re an angel, that’s what you are,’ Mrs Drew told her, and although Sally has been called plenty of nastier names in her life, she does like to think that she and Sam the postie form a kind of unofficial watch, simply because their jobs involve daily visits to lonely people.
Sam is an odd one. He’d come down from Yorkshire, having left behind the house he’d bought as a young welder, and given it to his ex-wife and two daughters. ‘There was no point in asking her to sell up so I could start again. Neither of us had the money, and she was the one who had to bring up the kids. It wasn’t her fault or mine; we just married too young.’
He’s a small, wiry man who lives in a camper-van on a bit of land he rents from a farmer near Shipcott. Though it can’t be comfortable for him doing without electricity or running water, he always stands his round in the pub, and cuts poor old Jim’s grass and hedge for free because his neighbour is dying of emphysema and has no family to help him. There are so many elderly people who have retired to their dream cottage in Devon when strong and healthy in their sixties who end up like that, Sally thinks, widowed and alone. But Sam drops in on everyone around Trelorn several times a week with the post, which is why he’d been the one to find poor Oliver Randall.
It had been an awful experience. The police questioned him twice, and had taken a DNA sample. For a while, even people who’d known Sam for years believed he must have done it. But nothing, as far as the police could tell, had been taken. He had a wallet with £300 in it, left on his bedroom table. So the matter was dropped, but Sam told Sally he still hated coming down the lane to Home Farm.
‘I’m still afraid I’ll see his body, lying there with no head on. You can’t believe how shocking it was. He wasn’t the type to hurt a fly.’
‘I only heard him at the Nativity play.’
‘Well I’m no musician, but I heard him playing sometimes. The sounds he could make! Take your heart out of your body.’
Sally had only glimpsed Randall once or twice a year, usually walking along the verge to or from the village, always with his dog, the same dog Di Tore has taken in. Would it have attacked somebody for assaulting its master? She doesn’t know much about lurchers, but even Baggage had snarled one time when Sally had been shouted at by a mum. Maybe the dog had been locked up, or maybe it had been afraid – or maybe it had known the killer. Impossible to say.
‘It’s frightening to think how such a thing can happen here,’ she agreed.
Sam’s kindly face was twisted with worry. ‘I keep wondering, Was it anyone I know? Could I even have passed them in my van? But he was dead and cold when I found him.’
‘It must have been something to do with people he’d known in London,’ Sally said, comfortingly.
‘I hope so. Nobody can rest easy if there’s some lunatic wandering around, can they?’
A country murder is always supposed to be vaguely comical, only it’s not, especially if you live in a place where people have grown together over centuries like the roots of a grove of trees. In fact, it’s far worse than a murder in a city, which is the kind of place you expect bad things to happen, what with people being crammed in like battery hens. If you’re exposed to nature and weather, you have to look after yo
ur neighbour, because one day your neighbour will look after you. Country homes are cluttered because you never know what’s going to be needed, from old tyres to baler twine. Everyone keeps torches, jump-leads and First Aid kits because if you don’t need them, someone else is bound to.
These days, however, it’s far too easy to never see any of your neighbours at all. You don’t need to post a letter, and if you don’t have children at school or go to church or go down the pub, or volunteer, it’s easy to be isolated. Oliver Randall had a dog, which helped, and he took pupils, but like Sam he’d lived alone down a long lane, and nobody really knows what goes on in such places. Maybe he’d been a secret Satanist. Maybe he’d been a dogger. Or maybe he was just one of the many people living in the country who enjoyed their own company best, and some lunatic had found him.
It didn’t stop Sally herself from feeling uneasy. However loyal she is to country life, she knows as well as anyone that some villages are awash with heroin addicts: and then the burglaries begin. Ever since the murder, people had started locking doors again. The parents of children at Shipcott still felt funny about letting their kids stay with the Bredins for a sleepover, according to Lottie. Even Lottie has admitted to moments of unease, especially at night. She seems lonely, despite her family and her new job.
Perhaps this is why she has formed a friendship with Lottie Bredin, who is as tall and tense as she herself is round and relaxed. At any rate, they enjoy talking. She has joined Sally’s book group, an honour of which she is perhaps not quite as conscious as she might be, and in two months has gone from being someone the other members were slightly anxious about to being genuinely welcome. They have understood, in the way of observant countrywomen, that although Lottie is thin and clever, she is very unhappy.
‘As who wouldn’t be, married to that arrogant pillock,’ said one, after she’d gone.
Lottie talks to people, unlike her boss, who wafts about smiling into his beard in the smug manner of architects spending other people’s money.
There are so many odd bods around who don’t make the effort. The worst are the hippies, who expect to be made welcome just because they’ve decided to bestow themselves on a community, knowing nothing whatever about it, and spouting all kinds of nonsense about ecology. They insulate their lofts with organic wool, then have a nasty shock when the moths get in. But so many are fleeing west, it seems. Painters, folk singers, cabinetmakers, children’s authors, eco-warriors, yurt-dwellers, yoghurt-makers, yoga teachers, communards, cheesemongers, chefs, mindfulness therapists, you name it, they are all here. As long as they work or, better still, create employment, they have to be a good thing, even if some are the hated bankers buying up country estates in order to have shooting parties and the like: rather that than houses in the Caribbean, Sally thinks. But what is needed above all is youth. Trelorn, like so many places, has to have families staying for more than low property prices.
Meanwhile, Lottie’s daughters have become friends with her nieces, and often come up to the farm with them.
‘It’s so lovely to see this,’ Lottie said, sitting in Sally’s garden. ‘I’d never have believed a cat and a dog could be friends like yours are. It’s like something out of a fairy tale.’
‘Oh, problems don’t go away just because they’re in a beautiful place. Still, a different place can make you see problems differently, can’t it?’
‘I’ve put our house on the market again,’ she said. ‘Quentin can’t bear the country, though. Every day away from the city is a wasted one, as far as he’s concerned.’
‘I’d be very pleased if you do stay, and so will a number of people.’
‘That’s nice to know.’
Yet there’s something about Home Farm that worries Sally. It ought to be lovely, especially with all the clever things her friend has done to the inside, only every time Sally pops in and drives down that long sloping lane, it’s as if everything from the big beech tree halfway down to the hammering woodpeckers is warning her. She’s never normally afraid of anything – you can’t live up on Dartmoor and be fearful – yet seeing that house gleaming like a shard of bone, her heart begins to thump.
Sally passes the food-bank appeal again, and suddenly turns round to drop in some tinned tomatoes, condensed milk and soup. So what if Peter doesn’t want to give food away: it’s her money she’s spending, isn’t it? He can grump and groan all he likes.
‘Come on, Baggage!’
The springer has encountered a terrier, and the two dogs circle each other ecstatically, twisting their leads around their owners like maypole dancers. Sally disentangles her, apologetically, and looks up.
‘Morning,’ she says, seeing Lily Hart holding on to the terrier’s lead while dragging two small kids and a squalling baby strapped to her middle. All of them are wearing brightly coloured knitted hats that could only have come from Totnes. She smiles at Lily, who glowers at her.
‘I’ve just been delivering some veg boxes to Mum and Dad at the hotel.’
She looks at Sally as if to challenge her, and Sally knows perfectly well it’s because she still hasn’t got her kids to have an MMR jab. Sometimes she feels like taking certain mums by the scruff of their necks and shaking them, they’re so obstinate.
‘It must be nice for your parents to be able to put “home-grown” on the menu,’ Sally says, encouragingly.
‘Dad thinks his mission in life is to educate the public about wine, not food,’ Lily answers.
If that’s the case, then Simon Hart has been his own best pupil, Sally thinks. The White Hart has a dining room with a spectacular view of the Tamar, but most of the windows are obscured by rows of empty bottles.
‘I’m sure their customers appreciate both,’ she says. Poppy Hart is a good cook, and it’s thanks to her that the hotel bar and restaurant has any clientele. What on earth had she ever seen in an old stick like Simon? But then, how often did one look at a couple, and wonder this? Maybe they thought it of Peter and herself. Or, most likely, didn’t think at all because the truth was, most people were too busy thinking only of themselves.
Peter emerges from the shop, blinking and looking mildly bewildered. Towns have this effect on him; even though Sally had made sure he shaved, brushed his hair and put on a clean check shirt, he looks like a faded version of himself away from his flock and his fields. She smiles and waves, and his face suddenly relaxes.
‘Let me take those bags, m’ dear,’ he says.
Sally relinquishes the bags, gratefully.
‘I gave some tins to the charity, Pete. I hope that’s all right,’ Sally says.
‘Yes, of course.’
Why do I need to ask him? Sally thinks. Her sister Anne has said to her, quite often, that she’s too deferential to her husband, but then she chose an educated man, whereas Peter hadn’t even been able to go away to agricultural college. He would have got a full grant for college and all, but for Pete’s father turning his gun on himself. Nobody missed him: he’d beaten his wife, and they all knew it.
Men! Sally thinks. Almost all the trouble in the world comes from them, their aggression and lust and pride. She trots along beside her husband. When Oliver Randall’s killer is found, she has no doubt it’ll be a man.
24
The Siren Call
Back in London, Lottie barely pauses to park outside her mother’s house before rushing to the hospital with Xan, dragging him along by the hand as if he were eight, not eighteen.
‘Wait, Mum, slow down,’ he says. ‘We haven’t even had lunch.’
‘You can get a sandwich later,’ she tells him.
His resistance is maddening; he wants to listen to the siren call of money spilling out from Hampstead High Street, goggling like a tourist. She’s heard it herself, that call, only love makes her deaf to it. The people and traffic are infuriating obstacles to getting through to her mother, whose frailty and mortality have suddenly become horribly urgent.
Marta has always been there, either in person
or at the other end of a telephone: fierce, funny, maddening, feminine and above all intelligent. By the time most people are just getting up Marta has filleted the newspaper, listened to the Today programme, done the crossword and performed Pilates; she reads all the best books, sees the best plays and recitals, beats everybody at Scrabble and is a popular figure in the cosmopolitan circles she moves in. Yet Quentin loathes her.
‘Your tendency to micromanage comes entirely from her.’
‘No, it’s mine, because that’s the only way I can feel more secure,’ Lottie answered.
‘You see life as a dreary board game which you must always win, whereas I see it as a rope, made up of thousands of tiny filaments twisted together,’ Quentin said. ‘You can’t predict which one will be important.’
‘If I didn’t micromanage, as you call it, you’d have no toilet paper. Isn’t that important?’
When Marta dies, Lottie thinks, I may have nobody left to talk to, and nobody who actually really cares about me or knows me as a person. It’s not entirely true, but at this moment it feels as if she is on the edge of disaster. Because of Xan, it has always been the two of them, not exactly contra mundum but unfailingly loyal to each other. Marta and she had formed a perfect little unit, which when she fell in love with Quentin had been disrupted.
But that is the trouble with lust, Lottie thinks. It reminds you that your body has a life of its own. One thing her departure from London has taught her is that her disappointment and fury towards her husband is at least partly composed of self-disgust. Even now, she can’t bear to think of the trust she had given him, and worse, how much she had made herself vulnerable to him when he was the most critical man in the world. To not think of it requires huge amounts of mental energy – but at least she now has some reserves of this.
