by Ann Cleeves
‘When do you leave?’
‘A couple of days.’
‘Mel didn’t say anything to me.’ Rosie convinced herself that was why she was so angry. She felt herself close to tears. They were supposed to be best friends.
‘She wanted to keep it a secret. I don’t know why.’
Because she likes secrets, Rosie thought. She likes keeping things to herself. She’s a hoarder. Perhaps that’s what the stuff with food is about.
‘What was all that with your mum last night?’ he asked with a complete change of tone. He pulled a prim, schoolmistress face. This was the Joe the others knew, the gossip and the clown.
Rosie was cross. Hannah was an easy target. ‘She’s had a bad time. All the talk. You know what it must be like, finding out that your husband’s a rat after twenty years. And she has it rough at work. It’s not a bunch of laughs in the prison.’
‘No,’ he said quickly, seeing that he had offended her. ‘It won’t be. I didn’t mean . . .’
The businessman came back to the bar. He held out his glass to her. She saw that his hand was shaking.
‘Your mum’s all right,’ Joe said. ‘We were being stupid.’
Rosie served the customer and let it go.
His burger came. He ate it quickly, holding it in his hand and tearing away at it as if he were ravenous. He stood still when he’d finished and she thought he was going to say something else about Mel. Perhaps he wanted to enlist Rosie’s support in finding out what lay behind the paranoia. But he just nodded.
‘See you in a week then. If I don’t catch up with you before we go.’
And he was gone.
That evening at a different pub, Rosie’s local, it was still warm enough to sit outside. She’d eaten the veggie lasagne her mother had cooked for dinner, had a shower and changed into a sleeveless frock. The beer garden was at the back, away from the road, though there was still a far-off hum of traffic. A row of conifers separated the pub from playing fields. There were tubs on the terrace and shrubs under the trees, a faint exotic smell of flowers and pine.
‘Melanie and Joseph are going away,’ Rosie said, using the full names as if it were a formal announcement. As in ‘I, Melanie, take you, Joseph’. That wouldn’t surprise her either. Joe was besotted enough to do it and he’d always been into crazy gestures. Melanie’s parents would be delighted. Melanie would have a full-time minder and they could go back to the real business of making money.
‘Isn’t Melanie’s name Gillespie?’ her mother asked.
Rosie hardly heard. She was imagining Mel’s dress, the church, the flowers. Her as chief bridesmaid. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Melanie Gillespie.’
‘And her dad’s the businessman?’
‘That’s right.’
When she’d first asked Melanie what her father did she’d said he ran a chip shop. Computer chips, it turned out. He’d set up a huge plant on the site of a derelict factory, was a major local hero because of all the jobs it provided.
‘He was on the television again tonight,’ Hannah said.
Mel’s dad was always on the television.
‘They’re going to the Algarve,’ Rosie said. ‘Mel and Joe.’
‘Will you be at a bit of a loose end then?’
‘I have got other friends!’
For a while she had been watching a small, plump man hovering just out of her mother’s line of vision. She thought he had been listening in, waiting for them to finish their conversation. Now he was approaching and Hannah stood up to greet him. Rosie thought, She planned this all along. She knew I’d not come if she warned me.
‘This is Arthur,’ Hannah said.
Rosie could tell her mother was nervous and decided to be gracious. ‘Hi.’
‘Arthur works with me at the prison. He’s a psychologist.’
Rosie nodded. What could you say?
‘Rosie was just telling me that two of her friends are going on holiday.’ Hannah shot her the look Rosie remembered from Sunday-afternoon tea at her grandma and granda’s house. A pleading look which said, Please behave, please don’t show me up.
Rosie said nothing. Arthur smiled. It would be easy, Rosie thought, to be taken in by that smile.
Hannah continued, ‘I was just going to tell her about my trip.’
‘What trip?’
‘There’s a school reunion. I thought I should go . . .’
‘Great. Can I come?’ It was a malicious offer. She didn’t want her mother to go off with this little round man with the beguiling smile. She wanted to pay Hannah back for treating her like a six-year-old.
‘Do you really want to?’
Hannah looked so pathetically grateful that Rosie couldn’t say she didn’t mean it. Anyway, what was wrong with running away for a couple of days?
‘Why not?’
Arthur smiled again as if this was what he’d been planning all along and he went to the bar for drinks.
Chapter Eight
Although Hannah had avoided Sally since she’d left the town to go to university, she had kept in touch with her friend’s news. Sally had gone up in the world since they’d first become mates in Cranford. At school she’d lived with her parents on a small council estate, a couple of streets which ran down the hill to the west of the town. Her father had been a barber. Her mother had worked in the chemist’s in the high street. There’d been a younger sister, a pretty child called Joanne. Hannah’s dad had worked in the only bank in the town and they’d owned their own home, but the families’ lives had been very similar. There’d been an emphasis on good manners and tidiness. Of course, after Hannah’s father had died things were never the same again. Then she’d loved spending time with Sal’s family. Everything in their little house had seemed safe and respectable.
Sally didn’t go to university. She’d had no academic ambition though she’d been bright enough. Instead she’d got a job as office junior on the local paper. She was still there in a more glorified form, writing features and running the women’s page. She’d sent Hannah a cutting when she first got the post as features editor. There had been a photograph at the top of the page and she’d put on a lot of weight. Hannah thought she made the job sound grander than it was. The paper had turned into one of those free weeklies which are seventy per cent adverts. She did write back to congratulate Sally about the promotion. She hadn’t wanted to appear mean spirited.
When she was nineteen Sally married Chris, a lad they’d knocked about with. A baby arrived soon after. Chris worked for a printer and on summer evenings ran a disco in the caravan site near the lake. There was one more baby then Hannah heard that they’d separated. Much later she saw a piece in a Newcastle paper saying Chris had been sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment for selling drugs. She wondered if he would turn up at the prison, but if he had she’d never met him. Not so far as she knew. Would she have recognized him after all this time?
When Sally wrote to say that she was getting married for a second time to a local businessman, Hannah had imagined a shopkeeper or someone running a small unit on the business park near the river. A barber even, like her dad. But it turned out that Sally’s new husband was an hotelier. Hannah might have gone to the wedding – in fact had been building herself up to it – but in the end she was never invited. Sally said it was a very small affair because she and Roger were busy preparing for the holiday season. The hotel was close to the lake and attracted tourists.
On the drive to Cranford Rosie fell asleep before they’d left their estate and didn’t wake until they’d nearly arrived. She sat with her head tipped back, snoring slightly through an open mouth. Hannah didn’t mind. It was a reminder of what she’d looked like as a small child.
She had only been back to Cranford once, for her mother’s funeral, and that was in her third year of university. Because she was so far away – she had been at university in Exeter – the funeral had been organized by Hannah’s aunt. Hannah had stayed with her for one night then returned to the W
est Country, glad of the excuse of exams.
Jonathan couldn’t understand her refusal to return to the place of her birth. In the beginning at least, he had been interested in going. ‘For Christ’s sake, H, it’s only fifty miles away. We could be there and back in an afternoon. Show me the scenes of your wild youth.’ He’d thought he was being funny. Hannah had made no attempt to explain her reluctance.
They came upon the town almost before she realized, and then she saw with a start that it had hardly changed at all. It felt as she remembered it: stately, quiet, seductive; a place which was hard to leave, very different from Millhaven, the town on the coast which was now her home. That was rakish and full of people passing through – students, hotel workers, yuppies using it as a staging post. And affluent businessmen like Richard Gillespie who lived there to show they had a certain style and personality. Though no doubt he would be moving on too.
The hotel was in a village called Cranwell, very close to the lake. She must have passed through it on her way to the caravan site but she had no recollection. It was pretty enough. There was one main street with stone cottages, a small first school backing on to open fields, a large church. The hotel was down a track next to the church and was called The Old Rectory. It was a big, grey Victorian house with steep gables, an immaculate garden and a view of the graveyard. Hannah had been imagining something seedy, with draughty corridors and stained baths, and was pleasantly surprised. It had an air of class and of money. Rosie had stirred as they pulled on to the drive and now stretched, yawned and scrabbled under the seat for her shoes. Hannah wished she didn’t look quite so grubby or dishevelled. She wanted Sally to admire her daughter.
There were other cars in a courtyard at the side of the house. All of them were newer and larger than Hannah’s Polo – Jonathan of course had taken the Rover when he left. Rosie got out of the car and Hannah saw that the seam of her skirt had split at the back. She began to feel nervous, as if they had no right to be there. There was complete silence, of the sort that you find in small Spanish towns at siesta time. It was even hotter here than on the coast and Hannah was reminded of the dense, bright heat of a Mediterranean afternoon. Although the house was close to the main village street there was no sound of traffic or conversation. They walked through an arch and round the house to the main entrance. The front lawn was set for croquet. Two mallets lay with balls on the grass. Beyond a green wire-mesh fence was a tennis court, freshly marked. No one was about.
Rosie whistled and said, ‘Not bad.’ She pulled the hair back from her face, twisted it and fastened it with a comb. She looked immediately tidier. ‘I can’t see a pool,’ she said regretfully. ‘Still, in a normal summer, when would you use it? Really, it’s not bad at all.’
The front door was open and led to a large wood-panelled hall with a stone fireplace. There was no reception desk, no bell to ring to attract attention. They stood for a moment. It seemed very dark after the glare outside, and wonderfully cool. Three doors led into the hall but all were shut.
‘Well,’ Rosie demanded. ‘Are we going to stand here like lemons?’ There were times when Hannah wondered that she had created such an assertive young woman. Rosie raised her voice. ‘Hello,’ she shouted. ‘Anybody home?’
‘Ssh . . .’ Hannah felt awkward, as if she’d wandered into a private home and sworn at the hosts. She would have stood there all day.
Rosie began to shuffle impatiently. There was a woodblock floor. She’d learned tap dancing as a child and began to tap her heels and toes to some rhythm in her head. It was an irritating habit and came upon her whenever there was space to move. She’d never been able to stand still. In the distance a door opened and shut and they heard footsteps. Rosie continued to hop and shimmy and click her fingers. Hannah motioned at her to stop. The middle door into the hall opened and a man appeared. Beyond him she saw a corridor, a sunny window. She didn’t at first take him to be Sally’s husband. He was older than she would have expected, at least fifty-five, but it was more than that. He wasn’t the sort of man she thought Sally would be married to. He wore an open-necked shirt, brown trousers with a neatly pressed crease and, despite the heat, a cardigan with pockets. His hair was thin and grey, too long at the back. Perhaps after Chris Sally had had enough of wild men. Rosie slid to a halt.
The man blinked in a way which Hannah found oddly familiar, smiled a thin, long smile and held out his hand.
‘You must be Sally’s friends.’ His voice was light, clipped, a little spinsterish, and again she felt she should recognize it. ‘Not a good day for a drive, I’m afraid. Poor you. This weather doesn’t show any sign of breaking. I suppose we shouldn’t complain. By the time you’ve had a chance to freshen up Sally will be home. She was sorry not to be here when you arrived, but today’s a busy one for the paper. She’s looking forward to the reunion.’
He picked up Hannah’s holdall and directed them towards a curving staircase. Rosie went first and he stared as she walked ahead of him at the long brown legs appearing through the slit in her skirt. Hannah wanted to hit him, but knew Rosie would probably take the attention for granted. Across the graveyard the church clock struck five. The noise seemed to shock him out of a trance and he turned to Hannah, muttering something about the age of the tower. Their room was at the back of the house. It was large and high ceilinged with a full-length window looking over a rose garden and across more lawn. Beyond that, dazzling in the sunlight, was the lake.
Roger seemed to have regained his composure. He gave them an arch little smile as if he were enjoying some private joke and left them alone.
‘Hey,’ Rosie said. ‘This is a bit of all right.’
Hannah dragged her attention from the lake and looked at the room. Solid Victorian furniture was lightened by pale yellow bedspreads and curtains. Rosie dropped the sophisticated pose she put on for her friends and became a child again. She bounced on the bed and danced around the room opening drawers and doors. ‘No mini-bar but two sorts of biscuits on the tea tray and very nice smellies for the bath. And Sky.’ She began to strip for the shower with a sort of mock striptease, not caring that the curtains were still open. Remembering Roger, Hannah closed them.
They had made themselves tea and were watching the early-evening news when Sally came in. Hannah thought she had put on weight, especially on the hips and the bust, but that she’d have known her anywhere. She was stylishly dressed in a thrown together, ramshackle way, in a cream linen skirt which came down to her ankles and a long cream top, crumpled at the back where she’d been sitting. There wasn’t any awkwardness. She pulled Hannah towards her so she bounced against the pneumatic bosoms. Then she sat on the bed and started talking.
‘God, what a gorgeous daughter. You’re so lucky, H. I only had boys and they were monsters. They left home long ago, thank the Lord, and they only appear when they want something. Roger puts up with it, the sweetie. God knows why.’ She paused. ‘You know, it’s so good to see you. I’d given up thinking I’d ever get you here.’ She grinned wickedly. ‘You didn’t recognize Roger, did you? He didn’t think you did.’
Hannah was embarrassed. She dredged back in her memory for the circumstances when she’d heard the pedantic voice. She had a fleeting image of school, of sitting with a crowd of others on the edge of the stage in the hall, then it was gone.
She mumbled, ‘Something about him was familiar,’ knowing how pathetic she sounded.
‘Probably best forgotten,’ Sally said. ‘That’s what I thought until I met him again. I came to do a feature on him when he bought this place. You won’t believe it but he swept me off my feet. Perhaps this will jog your memory.’ She stood up, put her hands behind her back and in a surprisingly accurate imitation of her husband’s voice said, ‘If that homework’s not handed in tomorrow, Miss Marshall, I’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks.’
It was the final phrase that released the memory. It was the threat for every occasion. Hannah started to giggle, quickly put her hand over her mouth
to cover it.
‘You married Spooky Spence?’ It was impossible to keep the astonishment from her voice. She wanted to ask Sally how on earth she came to do anything so ridiculous.
‘Exactly,’ Sally said, enjoying Hannah’s surprise. ‘Spooky Spence.’
He had taught them Latin for O level. At the time Hannah had thought of him as middle-aged, verging on the elderly, but he could hardly have been more than thirty. Now that she had fixed him in her memory she thought his appearance had hardly changed over the years. She remembered those lessons as restful occasions. A quiet sunny classroom. Mr Spence’s voice a drone in the background as they plodded through Virgil and Caesar’s Civil Wars. And he had been involved in the school play. That was what the flash of memory had been about.
‘But you couldn’t stand him,’ Hannah said.
Sally had never liked drama and had hated the Latin lessons. She’d never got to grips with the grammar. Spence had been quietly but menacingly sarcastic.
She grinned. ‘He couldn’t stand me either. He hated teaching. I mean, he didn’t mind fiddling round with the theatre club but standing in front of a class all day was a nightmare. Food’s always been his real passion. You wouldn’t recognize him in the kitchen. When his mum died she left him a house and a bit of money. It gave him enough to set up this place. It’s been an exciting project for us both.’
Rosie had been watching the conversation with interest. Perhaps she was wondering what it would be like to get involved with a teacher much older than her. A bit close to home.
‘Why did you call him spooky?’ It wasn’t a tactful contribution, but again Sally didn’t take offence.
‘It was his way of appearing beside you without warning. Apparently out of thin air. When you least needed it. Like when you’d just lit a fag behind the changing rooms. Or you were planning to mitch off early before his lesson.’ She grinned again at Rosie. ‘Not that your mother ever did anything like that. Hannah Meek was the biggest swat in the school.’
