A Place to Lie

by Rebecca Griffiths

  ‘Oh, how nice they look. A shame not to meet them. Didn’t they want to come with you and Mike?’ Mrs Hooper asks.

  ‘They never met Carrie; it would’ve been silly to pull them out of school.’ Another anchoring pause. ‘You knew that Carrie tried to kill herself sixteen years ago, didn’t you?’ Joanna waits for confirmation as she returns the photograph to her purse. ‘Mike was really sweet with her when she came out of hospital, wanting to take care of her, making sure she knew she wasn’t on her own. We hadn’t been seeing each other for long.’ She bounces her hands in her lap. ‘It used to upset him when Carrie … well, she could be pretty nasty to me.’ Joanna avoids all mention of her three-month hospital stint, followed by eight months of chemotherapy for a tumour on her spleen six years ago – information about her private life she managed to keep out of the press. There’s little point worrying Mrs Hooper, especially as her oncologist gave her the all clear last July and she’s totally well again.

  Joanna takes another gulp of wine, before replenishing both their glasses.

  ‘You look so like your mother, you know,’ Mrs Hooper announces. ‘She was such a beautiful woman, and her hair … ’ a broad smile of appreciation. ‘Like the rosy gold of sunsets. Just like yours.’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew Mum?’ Joanna, curious, says nothing about her hair falling out during her treatment, her fears it wouldn’t grow back.

  ‘Didn’t you? She didn’t tell you about the time she stayed at Pillowell?’

  ‘No. When was this?’

  ‘Oh, now, let me think – the summer before you were born, if I remember correctly. It annoyed Dora,’ Mrs Hooper chuckles, ‘the amount of time Imogen spent with us at Pludd Cottage. But it was hardly our fault she preferred our company. Your mum liked listening to me playing the piano; she said it relaxed her.’

  ‘That’s nice.’ Joanna scrunches her lips, refusing to cry again. ‘But where was Dad? I can’t imagine Mum going anywhere on her own, she was way too nervy.’

  ‘I’m not sure where Robin was. Perhaps he took Carrie to see his parents. I seem to remember your mother didn’t get on with her in-laws particularly well.’

  ‘That’s putting it mildly. She refused to have anything to do with them after Dad died.’

  ‘Gordon looked after Imogen. Drove her to town, showed her the sights. The two of them got on remarkably well, as I remember.’ Mrs Hooper smiles at the waitress when their lunches arrive. ‘Your mother could be very charming when she put her mind to it.’

  Joanna doesn’t answer as she unravels her cutlery from a serviette, reluctant to discuss her troubled mother any further; some things are best left alone.

  Summer 1990

  There was a path that cut through the overhanging trees and thigh-high ferns; a path beaten flat by the rougher boys from Slinghill who came down to Drake’s Pike to swim. A place where the water was shallow and safe, but only if you steered away from the helter-skelter madness where the River Teal emptied itself into the lake.

  With knapsacks strapped tight across their clammy backs, Caroline, Joanna and Ellie felt the slow heat through their thin clothes as they moseyed along in single file. Arrow shafts of sunlight speared the canopy of leaves and an unspoken danger hung in the air like an imminent storm. Subdued by the ethereal stillness, they intermittently turned their heads to the deeper, darker section of woods that unfolded around them like a wing.

  ‘Daddy says to watch for snakes.’ Ellie, the crunch of last year’s leaves under her wheels, gleefully distributed Ian’s warning into the sap-thick air.

  ‘Snakes ?’ Caroline shrieked out of all proportion.

  ‘Oh, yeah. They love this weather.’ A sideways glance at Joanna and the two of them swapped secret smiles. ‘You could get lost in here,’ Ellie persisted with her game.

  ‘But you remember the way, don’t you? You’ve been here loads of times, right?’ Joanna scratched a bite on her leg and looked concerned.

  ‘Course I do,’ Ellie was quick to reassure her.

  Scattering unseen wildlife, the girls tiptoed around ash piles from recent fires of other visitors. Blissfully unaware of the figure that followed them from churchyard to woods. The someone who scuttled soundlessly back into the shadows, satisfied with the photographs they’d taken of these young girls. This was a setting where the little wind there was moved stealthily through the compressed foliage. Where rabbits and deer came to drink and leave their skittering tracks pushed into the fudge-soft reed bed. It didn’t cross the children’s minds they could be in any danger.

  When the woods finally widened into a sun-filled clearing, a singing blackbird was there to greet them. Through the swaying bulrushes, beyond the signal and flash of the water, was their destination with its little boat moored to the snout of a dilapidated wooden jetty.

  ‘There’s a good place to have our lunch.’ Caroline gestured to the lower junctures of a weeping willow that swept the skin of the water like dead men’s fingers. She led Joanna and Ellie over the moisture-laden ground, stopping when they reached a log as large as a pew in St Oswald’s where they could sit down. Stippled on its wetter underside with unidentifiable mushrooms they knew not to touch, the sisters whipped off their sandals, Ellie her skates, and the three of them dangled their insect-bitten shins in the deliciously cool water. Caroline, whose legs were the longest, was in the middle of divvying out the contents of all three knapsacks when a burst of flapping made them look up at the rush of white taking shape on their periphery. Two swans hit the water and skimmed to a halt. They watched the majestic waterfowl glide in perfect synchronisation, gasping in amazement when they folded their pure white wings away.

  ‘What’s that?’ Ellie snatched Caroline and Joanna’s concentration, and pointed to something in the trees.

  A shaking of heads; they saw nothing of interest.

  ‘Over there. Wanna go and look?’ Ellie asked Joanna, who happily left her seat in the reeds behind.

  ‘I’ll stay here and look after our stuff then, shall I?’ Her sarcasm wasted, Caroline returned her gaze to the stretch of water: a spangled cloth of diamonds under the dazzle of a big bald sun. Silence fell into Ellie and Joanna’s receding chatter, and Caroline found she rather liked the sensation. She focused on the golden rim of horizon, which shimmered thin as a leaf at the edge of the world, and pondered on the magic of such a place, until she remembered the stash of stuff she’d nicked. Jumping down from the log to check it was still where it should be, she squatted on the bank to grope for the hole she’d scooped out with stones, but it was too risky to lift the drawstring bag into the light and she withdrew her hand.

  Just in time. At the snapping of twigs a jack snipe – a streak of stripes and pale underbelly – rocketed away. Joanna and Ellie were back at the log, urgent and pestering her to come and see what they had found.

  ‘Bloody hell, it’s like the Marie Celeste .’ Caroline, tugging on her jelly sandals, kicked through a half-eaten picnic on a red tartan blanket. A bottle of Piat D’Or, its rocking indicating those who were al frescoing – a term of Dora’s – hadn’t long scarpered.

  ‘What’s the marry selest ?’ Joanna enquired, but was more interested in a Tupperware box of homemade cakes than Caroline’s potted history.

  ‘Maybe a boar chased them off,’ Ellie suggested. ‘We do get them, you know.’

  Caroline glared at her … snakes, wild boar … her thoughts tripping over themselves. ‘Something made them run; they were having a right nosh-up by the looks of it. Wanna swig?’ she said, bending to retrieve the bottle of wine.

  Ellie and Joanna turned their noses up and Caroline flung it to the ground.

  ‘Cor, I love chocolate brownies.’ Ellie peered into the transparent container.

  ‘Who d’you think it belongs to?’ Joanna crouched to examine the largest apple she’d ever seen.

  ‘Who cares. Finders keepers … Come on, take them.’ Caroline, privy to more than she was letting on about the picnickers. ‘They won’t
be coming back, trust me.’

  ‘Did you ever actually see him?’ Ellie leant back in the boat, her share of the chocolate brownies eaten.

  ‘Who?’ It was Caroline who answered; Joanna was busy munching on an apple the size of the moon.

  ‘Mr Hooper.’

  ‘Only once.’ Caroline scowled as she hauled the single oar through the water. ‘Mrs Hooper told me to take his tea up.’ Aiming for the mouth of the tunnel; it was proving difficult to steer.

  ‘And ?’ Ellie, all ears.

  ‘And nothing.’

  ‘You can’t say nothing – if something happened, you’ve gotta say,’ Joanna joined in, apple juice wetting her elasticated cuffs.

  ‘Oh, come here,’ Caroline grumbled. Securing the oar within its rollock, she yanked up Joanna’s sleeves. The puckered material left two bracelets of indented flesh on her sister’s chubby wrists and she rubbed them briskly to make them go away.

  ‘Err, gerroff .’ Joanna wriggled free of Caroline’s grip and sucked the sweetness from her fingers.

  ‘Clean on, that was. Get it dirty and you’ll only make Dora cross.’

  ‘It’s you she gets cross with; making those great big holes in your woollies – don’t you ever want to take it off? You must be boiling in that cardigan.’

  ‘No, I don’t. And anyway, Dora’s always crabby with me for something.’ Caroline took up the oar again.

  ‘Don’t tell fibs.’ Joanna, finished with her apple, lobbed the core into the water with a small plop. ‘She’s doing her best.’

  ‘Doing her best ? She’s bloody bonkers. She shouldn’t be trusted to look after children, she’s probably damaging us.’

  ‘I like her. Being here’s way better than home.’

  ‘What about that fuddy-duddy music she makes us listen to? You’re not saying you like that.’

  ‘Fuddy-duddy music ?’ Ellie was eager to know.

  ‘Yeah, we have to sit on our hands,’ Caroline filled her in. ‘It’s like doing detention.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ Joanna shook her head at Ellie. ‘She’s doing it to make us more … ’ She paused, wanting to share what Dora said, ‘Well-rounded human beings .’

  ‘Huh,’ Caroline snorted, ‘well-rounded , all right.’ She poked Joanna’s tummy, which strained the stitching of her dress. ‘All that weird food she cooks us.’

  ‘Better than Mum. All she does is sandwiches and them microwave chips.’ Joanna, indignant, brushed her sister’s hand away as if it was a wasp at a picnic. ‘I like Dora’s cooking.’

  ‘You would, you’d eat anything. D’you wanna know what she made us last night?’ Caroline turned to Ellie. ‘Roast chicken.’

  ‘Yum. I love roast chicken.’ Ellie licked her lips.

  ‘Yeah, but not with homemade onion marmalade – marmalade ! Who eats marmalade for dinner?’

  Ellie didn’t answer.

  ‘And she made a fruit salad.’

  ‘For pudding?’

  ‘That’s what I asked her, thinking she’d mixed it up. But no, it was to have with the chicken. It’s a Dutch thing, she said.’

  Ellie giggled.

  ‘I didn’t believe her neither, I think she still got it wrong. She’s off her rocker, she really is.’

  ‘I like her.’ Joanna was determined to have her say. ‘And anyway, it’s not like we’ve got a choice – Dora’s all we’ve got.’

  ‘We could stay at Mrs Hooper’s? She must be lonely without her husband.’

  ‘Seems happy to me.’ Joanna inspected her midriff.

  ‘Yeah, but she’s loads more interesting than Dora. Dora’s so boring, all she does is eat, sleep, and read. My teachers tell me I need stimulating … and that’s hardly stimulating, is it?’

  ‘Dora is interesting.’ Joanna, persistent in her defence of her great-aunt. ‘And she’s clever. What about that job she had? Mum says she speaks loads of different languages.’

  The sisters spent the next few minutes picking over what they knew of Dora’s mysterious career at the Foreign Office during the Cold War years. Titillating snippets of espionage and deceit harvested from eavesdropping on the conversations of grown-ups and nosing through three generations’-worth of treasures secreted at Pillowell. Ellie, meanwhile, had stopped listening; she was thinking about how much she loved the lake. Its wrinkled surface cobbled with light looked good enough to drink; but heeding her mother’s warning that it wasn’t safe, that anything could have crawled into it and died, she never dared.

  ‘I like those.’ Ellie, joining in with the sisters again, pointed with a long green reed to Joanna’s earrings.

  ‘You should get yours done.’ Joanna grinned, pleased the entrance of the tunnel was at last in sight.

  ‘No way.’ Ellie screwed up her face. ‘Mummy says I can if I want, but I’m scared it’ll hurt.’

  ‘It didn’t hurt.’ Joanna squeezed the plum of her earlobe. ‘Well, only a bit. It wasn’t bad, was it, Carrie?’

  Caroline made no attempt to reassure as she twiddled the knob of gold under her hair with bitten fingers.

  ‘I hate any kind of pain,’ Ellie announced in a way she might have expressed a dislike of semolina or Marmite and tugged the sleeves of her T-shirt down to hide the tops of her arms.

  ‘Ever twisted your ankle?’ Joanna had already seen the bruises Ellie hadn’t wanted her to see.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even doing your roller skating?’

  ‘No.’ Ellie, thoughtful.

  ‘What about kneeling on a drawing pin, or … or cutting yourself with scissors?’

  ‘No – have you?’ A look of dismay.

  ‘Loads of times.’ Joanna extended a knee to show what remained of a recent injury.

  ‘Err, that’s horrible.’ Ellie buried her face in her hands.

  ‘Ever had anyone die on you?’ Caroline said, her eyes unreadable beneath the hard line of eyebrow. She reckons she’s special, just because she’s got a lovely, happy family . Her resentment rushed at her, and she dropped the oar into the boat to let the current suck them inside the tunnel; the plan she was hatching to show Ellie the world wasn’t nice, and no one, however good they were, could get off that lightly, began to sprout wings.

  Eerie and magical, the boat glided like a gondola over the satin-skinned water, into the enveloping darkness and dripping sounds. Their voices shrunk into the spooky silence that seemed to swallow them whole, as water droplets from lemon-yellow stalactites hit their necks, icy and shocking, sliding down inside their collars. They floated downstream, back towards Witchwood, much as the boats transporting fleece from the sheep-rich pastures of the Cinderglade Valley had done a hundred years ago.

  The tunnel was over a mile long, the light at the end, nothing more than a pin-prick. The children pressed their tacky palms to the limestone crust of tunnel roof. Nefarious and unnavigable. They held their breath to the dark and traced the names of tunnellers chiselled into its rusticated stone pillars and pediments with their fingers – names echoed on the tombstones they’d seen in St Oswald’s graveyard.

  ‘Dora showed us this book of old photographs at the church. It’s called the Book of the Dead . Have you seen it, Ellie?’ Joanna’s question buffeted the blackness.

  ‘No. I’ve never heard of it.’ Ellie’s reply reverberated through the gloom. ‘Sounds horrible, what’s it like?’

  ‘It’s really creepy – isn’t it, Carrie?’

  ‘Too right – it’s full of dead people,’ Caroline was keen to stress. ‘Them who died building this tunnel. Well, the ones they could dig out after it collapsed,’ she added with relish.

  ‘I didn’t like it.’ Joanna squirmed.

  ‘That’s ’cos you’re just a big, fat baby. I think it’s great. I’ve been back loads of times to look at it.’ Caroline grinned into the obscurity. ‘You must have seen it, Ellie – why haven’t you seen it?’

  ‘I dunno. I’ve never heard of it,’ Ellie reaffirmed.

  ‘But you live here!’ Caroline w
as incredulous. ‘Don’t you even know what’s going on in your own village? It’s like one of the main attractions, that is.’

  ‘To you, maybe,’ Joanna piped up. ‘’Cos you’re sick.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m just mature and sophisticated,’ Caroline asserted. ‘Dora said it’s a really important piece of history and should be in a museum or something. So, Ellie, I think it’s gonna be up to me to educate you and take you to see it.’

  Then – the fringes of Slinghill long behind them, the River Teal snaking its way back to Witchwood – the tunnel ended and they were thrust into the white, bright endorsement of the afternoon. Momentarily blinded, none of them saw Gordon Hooper waiting for them on the bank. Suited as usual, his silk tie, pink as a bullfinch; he threw a sharp black shadow over them before darting away unseen through the trees.

  Present Day

  The Sunday train is almost empty and is a totally different experience from Joanna’s twice-weekly commute between St Albans and the Royal Academy of Music. A woman with chapped cheeks sits across the gangway and Joanna, fishing around in her bag for her mobile, listens to her gabbling vaguely to herself in a lilting, soothing voice.

  ‘You doing all right?’ she asks Mike when he finally picks up the phone.

  ‘Hi, babe. Yeah, all well here. You okay?’

  ‘Fine. Nearly there. Hardly anyone on the train.’ She stares out at the fast-moving roofs and high-rise buildings that make up the northern suburbs of London. ‘Freddie and Ethan okay?’

  ‘They’re fine. Watching cartoons with Pauline’s two.’

  A twinge of insecurity at the casual way her husband drops the name of their attractive and recently divorced neighbour into the conversation. ‘Pauline’s there then, is she?’ Joanna tries to sound indifferent.

  ‘Yeah, she is. D’you want a word?’

  ‘No, no. It’s you I want to talk to.’

  Still early, the sun barely up – Joanna sees it has yet to burn away the January frost that has settled on everything.