Contents
Cover
Also Available from Aliya Whiteley and Titan Books
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part Two
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part Three
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part Four
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part Five
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
The Cold Smoke Declaration
Bogof!
Author’s Note
SKEIN
ISLAND
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM
ALIYA WHITELEY AND TITAN BOOKS
The Arrival of Missives
The Beauty
The Loosening Skin (June 2020)
SKEIN
ISLAND
ALIYA
WHITELEY
TITAN BOOKS
Skein Island
Print edition ISBN: 9781789091526
E-book edition ISBN: 9781789091533
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First Titan edition November 2019
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Copyright © 2019 by Aliya Whiteley. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
For my brother
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
The library is empty for the first time today. I put away the rest of the returned books as I always do at closing time: the hardbacks on the shelves, the paperbacks in the rotating stand by the window that overlooks the car park. It’s blank out there, frozen under the shock of the outside light.
I think of the letter.
It arrived this morning, in a thick yellow envelope. My address was written by hand, in black pen. Above it was my maiden name. Miss Marianne Spence, like a call from the past. So I slipped a thumbnail under the flap of the envelope and ripped the past open.
The first thing I noticed was the letterhead, and then, at the very bottom, a single line written in the same hand as the address.
Each man delights in the work that suits him best.
The night is so still. I decide nobody else is coming to the library tonight, so I go into the back office and take the letter from my bag, where it hangs on the peg behind the door. I unfold it and read it through again. Am I distrustful of my memory or the typescript? Both, I suppose.
But it’s the same.
I’m pleased to inform you that I have personally allocated you a place for the duration of one week (date to be arranged). This letter entitles you to free accommodation, inclusive of all meals and activities. Please contact the reception desk on the telephone number or email address provided to arrange a time for your arrival. I look forward to meeting you.
Lady Amelia Worthington
I run my finger over the letterhead.
SKEIN ISLAND
I’ve told nobody. Not even David.
I’ve thought of it so often, wondered what it would be like to spend a week there: to take the classes, sleep in a bungalow, to write out the story of my life so far and leave it there for posterity. Would it change me? Would it do to me what it did to my mother?
No matter how I feel about the island, one fact is inescapable. I didn’t contact Lady Amelia Worthington. Nobody has contacted Lady Amelia Worthington. She has been dead for years.
The quote on the bottom of the letter bothers me – it’s a strange choice. I sit at the computer and Google it. I knew it was familiar. Homer’s Odyssey. I read it for the first time in my late teens; it gave me a taste for sweeping tales of fate, where a man overcomes such perils, risks everything to get back to where he started. And Penelope: waiting, weaving, unravelling, with a grace that I didn’t understand. Did she not feel such rage to be left behind? When it happened to me, I wasn’t serene. I wanted to understand her, but I couldn’t. I still don’t.
I switch off the computer and go back into the library. We have a copy of the Odyssey: the Rieu translation, a Penguin Classic that lives on the poetry shelf. It never gets checked out. I go to it and open it at random, flicking through the pages on fast-forward. Odysseus races through his journey, spurning the nymph, escaping the Cyclops, resisting the sirens. I had hoped for my eye to fall on a line that would answer the unexpected questions – should I accept this offer? What does the dead Amelia Worthington want with me?
A soft swish and a gust of frigid air tells me the automatic doors have opened. I look around the shelf and see a man. He has a pleasant face, and brown hair that’s cut very short. His cheeks are red from the cold.
‘Can I help you?’
He gives me an inclusive smile, as if he knows me and I am compliant in a game we have decided to play. He’s holding a knife in his right hand.
He says something that changes everything. ‘Get in the back. Take off your clothes and lie down.’
CHAPTER TWO
Marianne asked to go in alone, so he waited in the car, listening to big band music on the radio.
He couldn’t remember the drive. This wasn’t unusual; it happened every morning, in the liquid flow of Swindon traffic. He had become attuned to the drip-feed of traffic lights leading to the factory until – standing in the cafeteria next to the tray of bacon, watching it glisten under the heat lamps – David would wake up properly for the first time each day. Everything that happened before that moment was merely a continuation of the previous night’s dream, and it always worried him, that lost time. Would he react in a crash, a crisis? Could he see danger and evade it with a flick of the steering wheel, a stamp of the brakes?
He hadn’t seen this coming. The look on Marianne’s face as she walked through the door at ten past eight that evening was not something he had ever prepared for. Her hands were empty. Usually she put down a canvas bag, heavy with books, on the hall floor next to the coat stand. David had walked out of the kitchen and caught her naked face and hands doing none of their normal things. Her coat was still on – unbuttoned, flapping – and her cheeks were white with cold. She came to him, cupped her hands around his elbows, and said, ‘We need to get to a police station, okay?’ He’d felt the shock of the moment, usual rules suspended.
He realised that he was only just coming out of it, sitting alone in the din of trumpets and drums, while Marianne faced this thing alone. She was probably making a statement to a sympathetic policewoman in a small clean room, her voice being recorded as she enunciated what had been done to her in precise detail. He couldn’t imagine what words she would use. She had a bette
r vocabulary than him. He had a hard ball in the centre of his stomach that he could only describe as dread; he clenched his fists, tried to fight it off, wriggled in the seat.
The car park was half-full, and the glass sliding doors that led into the station were brightly lit. David could see a tiled floor and a standing pot plant, probably artificial. Nobody came or went.
* * *
The big band rhythm had segued into soft jazz before he saw her step out of the station and look around for their car.
He started the engine, drove to her; she got in and clipped in her seat belt, then gave him a smile and a shrug, easy and bright.
‘Let’s go home,’ she said.
‘Is it okay? What did they say?’
‘They’ll be on the lookout for him.’
‘Is that it?’ David said. He had a vision of getting out of the car, storming into the station and demanding justice, action, police cars out hunting all night. Or maybe he should take the law into his own hands and crouch in the bushes by the library, dressed in black, kitchen knife in hand – he had an idea it would make him feel better. But where was Marianne in his vision? He turned to her, took her cold little hand in his.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he said.
‘What do you want to know?’ She pulled her hand free.
‘Anything you want to tell me.’
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Let’s get going.’
He manoeuvred to the exit, and pulled out. The streets were quiet, the nine o’clock lull between tired workers on overtime and energised bunnies making for the pubs. Swindon was one roundabout after another, and he hardly had to stop at all; he turned the steering wheel in measured amounts, first to the left, then the right.
‘Maybe we should get a takeaway,’ said Marianne. Her voice was perfectly normal, as was the sentiment. He knew she was talking about the Chinese on Wootton Bassett high street. He wished he could look at her face.
‘Can do.’
She clicked off the radio. ‘I already told you it all. It was closing time, he came in, he told me to get in the back and take off my clothes.’
David heard her draw breath, and swallow.
‘And I told him no,’ she said. She opened the glove compartment, then shut it again, and turned up the heat control on the dashboard. He wanted to pull over and look at her face, but all he could see were her fingers: short, unvarnished nails, the ragged thumbnail on her left hand that she bit. When she was trying to concentrate on a novel she would frown and put her index finger on each line and follow the words like a child. Her fluttering hands moved around the car, touching dials and the sides of her seat.
‘And he went?’ David said.
‘He turned around and walked out.’
‘Just because you said no?’ He should have stuck to silence; there was something accusatory rising inside him, and he had no idea why.
‘I can remember thinking – if I go in the back, I won’t come out again. That’s just what I knew, and I thought about screaming, or trying to push past him to get to the door. Time was moving slowly, I mean, really slowly, and in the end I said no, in my best library voice, the one I use on the teenagers when they try to access dirty websites on the public computers. And he stared at me, and then he left.’
It occurred to David that this was his first big test as a husband. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.
‘I’m fine,’ said Marianne, ‘I’m really fine, I’m better than… I can’t explain it. All my life I’ve been afraid of something like this. I think, deep down, all women are afraid of some faceless man. And this guy, he came along, and I knew what he wanted, he wanted to hurt me, but he had a face. It’s not at all like I pictured it. Can you understand? Do men picture it too?’
‘Not in the same way,’ he said, ‘I don’t think.’
‘Maybe a man would just have fought, but for me, for women, there’s this question hanging over it. Whether I’d freeze or submit to anything he wanted, and I didn’t do those things. He was defeated by that. He was… surmountable, I suppose.’
‘Surmountable,’ David repeated. The word reassured him more than anything else Marianne had said. This was her, using a long word to describe a simple thing, a thing that a four-letter word could have covered.
‘It was freeing,’ she said. ‘I’m glad it happened, in a way. Yes.’
‘I hope they catch him before he tries it again,’ David said.
She fell silent.
‘You okay?’
‘I keep saying I’m fine. Forget the takeaway, okay? Let’s go home.’
It was just beginning to hit her, David thought: what could have happened. He wanted her to face it, to tremble, to fall towards him so that he could catch her and hold her together. They would get home, and not sleep tonight, but stay up all night talking it through, her crying, and it would be awful, but at the end of it they would be closer than before, he hoped, he wanted, closer in the way that survivors are.
He took the final roundabout into Wootton Bassett and turned into their estate. The Spar on the corner was still open, but he drove past, turned left, and parked up in their space. She got out of the car first and by the time he’d followed she was already at the front door, thrusting her key into the lock. The stiff lines of her shoulders suggested panic; he jogged to her, put his hands on her back as she threw open the door, and they stumbled into the dark house together.
‘Listen, it’ll be okay,’ he said, but Marianne was on him, kissing his face, putting her tongue in his mouth, her hands already at the waistband of his trousers. He tried to think rationally about it for one moment, and then felt his body respond to her. She pulled off her own trousers and took the stairs two at a time to their bedroom, the coldest room in the house due to a broken radiator; but she didn’t dive under the duvet as he expected. When he got into the room she was taking off her shirt, standing on the bed in her plain white knickers, the curtains open, the glow from the streetlight falling across her knees and feet.
‘Right now?’ he said.
‘Leave the curtains.’ She turned and knelt down, then took off her knickers. ‘This way.’
David came up behind her and pulled her towards him, his hands on her hips. She put her head down, on the duvet, giving him a view only of her body and her brown hair, tied up. He pulled it free and splayed it out over her back.
‘Now,’ she said, and he did as he was told.
* * *
He woke up, much later, when he heard the front door close.
For a moment he didn’t move. It took him a while to become aware of the room once more: the grey depth of very early morning, the still-open curtains that told him the streetlight was off, the suitcase missing from on top of the wardrobe, and the thin creases in the duvet beside him. He spread his arm into that empty expanse, then realised what it all meant.
Stuck to the cold blue face of the alarm clock was a Post-it note. On it, she had written, in small neat capitals:
GONE TO SKEIN ISLAND
He heard the car start; by the time he reached the street, in his boxer shorts, it was out of sight.
CHAPTER THREE
Skein Island is one of a series of women-only holiday resorts around the world. Founded in 1945, it was the first such resort ever to be opened, and until her death in 2008 it was the permanent home of the reclusive founder, Lady Amelia Worthington, heir to the Worthington fortune.
Skein Island was founded with a unique mission statement: to provide a week out of life. Any woman over the age of sixteen can apply in writing for a place, stating their reasons for wishing to attend. If a place is awarded, they are free to arrive at the resort for seven days – Saturday to Saturday, at a time of their choosing, according to availability of accommodation. The meals, the shared housing and the facilities are all free of charge. The criteria used to decide who will be offered a place are a closely guarded secret.
Facilities on the island include—
I fold the brochu
re and slip it back into my handbag. Lady Worthington decided back in 1945 what a woman is and who is worthy of her island, and if we want to come here we have to play by the rules that outlive her.
The room is far from full. There are seven other women; they’ve formed a self-conscious queue from the unoccupied reception desk to the dirty glass double doors. They have been my only company on the boat during the hour-long crossing. The pier at Allcombe had been deserted, too. A grey, slabbed stretch of closed kiosks and iron railings, icy to the touch, delineated land from sea.
I can’t believe I took that boat. I stepped on board the Sea Princess, helped over the threshold of the pier by a lanky young man in a bobble hat and fingerless gloves who had a businesslike set to his mouth. It was that sense of the journey as the last stage in a transaction that had, in the end, persuaded me to take that final step. And already there is dislocation from what went before. This is the breaking point of my life; from now on, everything will be different.
The women have nothing in common, not obviously, anyway. I expected the island to appeal to a certain type, although I’m not sure what type that would be. But the queue gives no information except that we are a patient lot. Nobody has arrived to take down our details. Outside the glass doors, the retreat of the Sea Princess is visible on the choppy grey waves. It will not return until next Saturday, so there really is no rush. At least, not for those of us in the queue.
But that gives me only seven days to find out why I’ve received an invitation from a dead woman.
A tall woman with loose brown hair, very straight, emerges from the doorway on the other side of the reception desk. She ignores the queue until she has switched on her computer screen and arranged herself in her seat; then she looks up, and a smile appears, as if she is surprised to find somebody waiting for her attention. I watch the others being dealt with: given multicoloured paperwork, talked to, dismissed in turn. Eventually there is nobody left to be processed except myself.
I approach the desk.
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