Big Sky

by Kate Atkinson

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2019 by Kate Costello Ltd.

  Cover design by Richard Ogle / TW

  Cover photographs by Shutterstock (seagull); Getty Images (background); Arcangel Images (pier)

  Author photograph by Euan Myles

  Cover © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Little, Brown and Company

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  First United States edition: June 2019

  Originally published in the United Kingdom by Doubleday, June 2019

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  ISBN 978-0-316-52310-3

  E3-20190521-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Eloping

  One Week Earlier

  Anderson Price Associates

  The Battle of the River Plate

  Albatross

  And All Things Nice

  Saving Lives at Sea

  Sugar and Spice

  The Kray Twins

  The Nineteenth Hole

  Holding Out for a Hero

  Summer Season

  Time, Gentlemen

  Encore

  WWMMD?

  Darcy Slee

  Beachcombing

  Lady with Lapdog

  The Final Straw

  Treasure Trove

  Paperwork

  Tipping Point

  Curtain Call

  Stage Fright

  Everyone Wants to Be the Wolf

  Girls, Girls, Girls

  Wuthering Heights

  The Unicorn in the Room

  Transylvanian Families

  Mustn’t Grumble

  Two-Way Traffic

  A Panda Walks into a Bar

  Funny Business

  En Famille

  Angel of the North

  Babes in the Wood

  Hansel and Gretel

  The Final Curtain

  Catch of the Day

  Hand of Glory

  Women’s Work

  Be the Wolf

  Blood Poisoning

  Cranford World

  Tonto

  The Tree of Knowledge

  Showtime!

  Sometimes You’re the Windshield

  Thisldo

  Haulage

  House of Mirth

  Fake News

  High Noon

  That’s All, Folks

  Don’t Just Fly

  Just the Facts, Ma’am

  Trouble at t’Mill

  Know When to Hold Them

  Getting the Hell out of Dodge

  What Would Tatiana Do?

  Kill the Buddha

  Darcy Slee

  The Fat Lady Sings

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Also by Kate Atkinson

  Song References

  For Alison Barrow

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  Before Enlightenment I chopped wood and carried water.

  After Enlightenment I chopped wood and carried water.

  Zen saying

  I’m for truth, no matter who tells it.

  I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against.

  Malcolm X

  Eloping

  “So what now?” he asked.

  “A quick getaway,” she said, shucking off her fancy shoes into the passenger footwell. “They were killing me,” she said and gave him a rueful smile because they’d cost a fortune. He knew—he’d paid for them. She had already removed her bridal veil and tossed it onto the back seat, along with her bouquet, and now she began to struggle with the thicket of grips in her hair. The delicate silk of her wedding dress was already crushed, like moth wings. She glanced at him and said, “As you like to say—time to get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “Okay, then. Let’s hit the highway,” he said and started the engine.

  He noticed that she was cupping the bowl of her belly where she was incubating an as yet invisible baby. Another branch to add to the family tree. A twig. A bud. The past counted for nothing, he realized. Only the present had value.

  “Wheels up, then,” he said and put his foot down on the gas.

  On the way, they made a detour up to Rosedale Chimney Bank to stretch their legs and look at the sunset that was flooding the vast sky with a glorious palette of reds and yellows, orange and even violet. It demanded poetry, a thought he voiced out loud, and she said, “No, I don’t think so. It’s enough in itself.” The getting of wisdom, he thought.

  There was another car parked up there, an older couple, admiring the view. “Magnificent, isn’t it?” the man said. The woman smiled at them and congratulated the “happy couple” on their wedding and Jackson said, “It’s not what it looks like.”

  One Week Earlier

  Anderson Price Associates

  Katja scrutinized Nadja’s makeup. Nadja posed for her as if she were taking a selfie, cheeks sucked in like a corpse, mouth pouted extravagantly.

  “Yeah. Good,” Katja pronounced finally. She was the younger of the two sisters but was by far the bossier. They could be twins, people always said. There were two years and one and a half inches between them. Katja was the smaller and the prettier of the two, although they were both petite and shared the same shade of (not entirely natural) blond hair, as well as their mother’s eyes—green irises encircled by gray.

  “Hold still,” Nadja said and brushed an eyelash off Katja’s cheek. Nadja had a degree in Hospitality Management and worked at the Radisson Blu, where she wore a pencil-skirted suit and two-inch heels and tidied her hair away in a tight bun while she dealt with complaining guests. People complained all the time. When she got home to her shoe-box apartment she shook her hair free and put on jeans and a big sweatshirt and walked around barefoot and no one complained because she lived on her own, which was the way she liked it.

  Katja had a job in housekeeping in the same hotel. Her English wasn’t as good as her older sister’s. She didn’t have any qualifications beyond school and even those were mediocre because she had spent her childhood and most of her teenage years ice-skating competitively, but in the end she just wasn’t good enough. It was a cruel, vicious world and she missed it every day. The ice rink had made her tough and she still had a skater’s figure, lithe and strong. It drove men a little crazy. For Nadja it had been dancing—ballet—but she had given it up when their mother couldn’t afford to pay
for lessons for both of them. She had sacrificed her talent easily, or so it seemed to Katja.

  Katja was twenty-one, living at home, and couldn’t wait to fly the stifling nest, even though she knew that a job in London would almost certainly be the same as the one she had here—making beds and cleaning toilets and pulling strangers’ soapy hair out of plugholes. But once she was there things would change, she knew they would.

  The man was called Mr. Price. Mark Price. He was a partner in a recruitment agency called Anderson Price Associates—APA—and had already interviewed Nadja over Skype. Nadja reported to Katja that he was attractive—tanned, a full head of attractively graying hair (“like George Clooney”), a gold signet ring, and a heavy Rolex on his wrist (“like Roger Federer”). “He’d better look out, I might marry him,” Katja said to her sister and they both laughed.

  Nadja had emailed scans of her qualifications and references to Mark Price and now they were waiting in Nadja’s apartment for him to Skype from London again to “confirm all the details” and “have a quick chat” with Katja. Nadja had asked him if he could find work for her sister too and he said, “Why not?” There was plenty of work in British hotels. “The problem is no one wants to work hard here,” Mark Price said.

  “I want to work hard there,” Nadja said.

  They weren’t stupid, they knew about trafficking, about people who tricked girls into thinking they were going to good jobs, proper jobs, who then ended up drugged, trapped in some filthy hole of a room having sex with one man after another, unable to get home again because their passports had been confiscated and they had to “earn” them back. APA wasn’t like that. They had a professional website, all aboveboard. They recruited all over the world for hotels, nursing homes, restaurants, cleaning companies, they even had an office in Brussels, as well as one in Luxembourg. They were “affiliated” and recognized and had all kinds of testimonials from people.

  From what you could see of it on Skype, their office in London looked very smart. It was busy—you could hear the constant murmur of staff in the background, talking to each other, tapping keyboards, answering the ringing phones. And Mark Price himself was serious and businesslike. He talked about “human resources” and “support” and “employer responsibility.” He could help to arrange accommodation, visas, English tuition, ongoing training.

  He already had something in mind for Nadja, “one of the very top hotels,” but she could decide when she arrived. There were plenty of opportunities “for a bright girl” like her. “And my sister,” she had reminded him.

  “And your sister, yes, of course,” he’d laughed.

  He would even pay their airfares. Most agencies expected you to pay them money up front for finding you a job. He would send an e-ticket, he said, they would fly to Newcastle. Katja had looked it up on the map. It was miles from London. “Three hours on the train,” Mark Price said, it was “easy.” And cheaper for him this way—he was paying for their tickets, after all. A representative of Anderson Price Associates would meet them at the airport and take them to an Airbnb in Newcastle for the night as the Gdansk flight came in late in the day. Next morning someone would escort them to the station and put them on a train. Someone else would pick them up at King’s Cross and drive them to a hotel for a few nights until they got settled. “It’s a well-oiled machine,” he said.

  Nadja could probably have gotten a transfer to another Radisson but she was ambitious and wanted to work in a luxury hotel, somewhere everyone had heard of—the Dorchester, the Lanesborough, the Mandarin Oriental. “Oh, yes,” Mark Price had said, “we have contracts with all those places.” Katja wasn’t bothered, she just wanted to be in London. Nadja was the more serious of the two, Katja the carefree one. Like the song said, girls just wanted to have fun.

  And so now they were sitting in front of Nadja’s open laptop waiting for Mark Price to call.

  Mark Price was on time, to the second. “Okay,” Nadja said to Katja. “Here we go. Ready?”

  The tiny delay in transmission seemed to be making it harder for her to translate what he was saying. Her English wasn’t as proficient as her sister had claimed. She laughed a lot to compensate, tossing her hair and looming nearer the screen as if she could persuade him by filling it with her face. She was pretty, though. They were both pretty, but this one was prettier.

  “Okay, Katja,” he said. “Time’s getting on.” He tapped his watch to illustrate because he could see the blankness behind her smile. “Is your sister still there?” Nadja’s face appeared on the screen, squashed against Katja’s, and they both grinned at him. They looked as if they were in a Photo-Me booth.

  “Nadja,” he said, “I’ll have my secretary email you the tickets first thing in the morning, okay? And I’ll see you both soon. Looking forward to meeting you. Have a good evening.”

  He turned the screen off and the girls disappeared. He stood up and stretched. Behind him on the wall was the smart APA logo for Anderson Price Associates. He had a desk and a chair. There was a print of something modern but classy on the wall. Part of it was in view in the camera on the laptop—he had checked carefully. On the other side you could see an orchid. The orchid looked real, but it was a fake. The office was a fake. Anderson Price Associates was a fake, Mark Price was a fake. Only his Rolex was real.

  He wasn’t in an office in London, he was in a mobile home in a field on the East Coast. His “other office,” as he thought of it. It was only half a mile inland and sometimes the screaming gulls threatened to spoil the illusion that he was in London.

  He turned off the recording of Office Ambience Sounds, switched off the lights, locked up the mobile home, and climbed into his Land Rover Discovery. Time to go home. He could almost taste the Talisker that his wife would have waiting for him.

  The Battle of the River Plate

  And there’s the Ark Royal, keeping a good distance from the enemy…

  There were a couple of quiet explosions—pop-pop-pop. The noise of tinny gunfire competing unsuccessfully with the gulls wheeling and screeching overhead.

  Oh, and the Achilles has taken a hit, but luckily she has been able to contact the Ark Royal, who is racing to her aid…

  “Racing” wasn’t quite the word that Jackson would have used for the rather labored progress the Ark Royal was making across the boating lake in the park.

  And here come the RAF bombers! Excellent shooting, boys! Let’s hear it for the RAF and the escorts…

  A rather weak cheer went up from the audience as two very small wooden planes jerked across the boating lake on zip wires.

  “Jesus,” Nathan muttered. “This is pathetic.”

  “Don’t swear,” Jackson said automatically. It was pathetic in some ways (the smallest manned navy in the world!), but that was the charm of it, surely? The boats were replicas, the longest twenty foot at most, the others considerably less. There were park employees concealed inside the boats, steering them. The audience was sitting on wooden benches on raked concrete steps. For an hour beforehand an old-fashioned kind of man had played an old-fashioned kind of music on an organ in a bandstand and now the same old-fashioned man was commentating on the battle. In an old-fashioned kind of way. (“Is this ever going to end?” Nathan asked.)

  Jackson had come here as a kid once himself, not with his own family (when he had a family)—they never did anything together, never went anywhere, not even a day trip. That was the working class for you, too busy working to have time for pleasure, and too poor to pay for it if they managed to find the time. (“Didn’t you hear, Jackson?” Julia said. “The class war’s over. Everyone lost.”) He couldn’t remember the circumstances—perhaps he had come here on a Scouts outing, or with the Boys’ Brigade, or even the Salvation Army—the young Jackson had clung to any organization going in the hope of getting something for free. He didn’t let the fact that he was brought up as a Catholic interfere with his beliefs. He had even signed the pledge at the age of ten, promising the local Salvation Army Temp
erance Society his lifelong sobriety in exchange for a lemonade and a plate of cakes. (“And how did that work out for you?” Julia asked.) It was a relief when he eventually discovered the real Army, where everything was free. At a price.

  “The Battle of the River Plate,” Jackson told Nathan, “was the first naval battle of the Second World War.” One of his jobs as a father was to educate, especially on his specialist subjects—cars, wars, women. (“Jackson, you know nothing about women,” Julia said. “Exactly,” Jackson said.) Nathan met any information conveyed to him by either rolling his eyes or appearing to be deaf. Jackson hoped that, somehow or other, his son was unconsciously absorbing the continual bombardment of advice and warnings that his behavior necessitated—“Don’t walk so close to the edge of the cliff. Use your knife and fork, not your fingers. Give up your seat on the bus.” Although when did Nathan ever go anywhere on a bus? He was ferried around like a lord. Jackson’s son was thirteen and his ego was big enough to swallow planets whole.

  “What do they mean—‘manned’?” Nathan said.

  “There are people inside the boats, steering them.”

  “There aren’t,” he scoffed. “That’s stupid.”

  “There are. You’ll see.”

  Here comes Exeter as well. And the enemy submarine is in trouble now…

  “You wait,” Jackson said. “One day you’ll have kids of your own and you’ll find that you make them do all the things that you currently despise—museums, stately homes, walks in the countryside—and they in turn will hate you for it. That, my son, is how cosmic justice works.”

  “I won’t be doing this,” Nathan said.

  “And that sound you can hear will be me laughing.”

  “No, it won’t. You’ll be dead by then.”

  “Thanks. Thanks, Nathan.” Jackson sighed. Had he been so callous at his son’s age? And he hardly needed reminding of his mortality, he saw it in his own boy growing older every day.

  Looking on the bright side, Nathan was talking in more or less whole sentences this afternoon, rather than the usual simian grunts. He was slumped on the bench, his long legs sprawled out, his arms folded in what could only be described as a sarcastic manner. His feet (designer running shoes, of course) were enormous—it wouldn’t be long before he was taller than Jackson. When Jackson was his son’s age he had two sets of clothes and one of those was his school uniform. Apart from his gym plimsolls (“Your what?” Nathan puzzled), he had possessed just the one pair of shoes and would have been baffled by the concept “designer” or “logo.”