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VINTAGE
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London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Ruth Ware 2017
Extract from The Death of Mrs Westaway © Ruth Ware 2018
Cover images: Alamy Stock Photo
Ruth Ware has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Harvill Secker in 2017
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
In a Dark, Dark Wood
The Woman in Cabin 10
To dear Hel, with (seventy?) lots of love
THE REACH IS wide and quiet this morning, the pale blue sky streaked with pink mackerel-belly clouds, the shallow sea barely rippling in the slight breeze, and so the sound of the dog barking breaks into the calm like gunshots, setting flocks of gulls crying and wheeling in the air.
Plovers and terns explode up as the dog bounds joyously down the riverbank, scampering down the runnelled side, where the earth turns from spiky grassy dunes to reed-specked mud, where the water wavers between salt and fresh.
In the distance the Tide Mill stands sentinel, black and battered against the cool calm of the morning sky, the only man-made structure in a landscape slowly crumbling back into the sea.
‘Bob!’ The woman’s voice rings out above the volley of barks as she pants to catch up. ‘Bob, you rascal. Drop it. Drop it, I say. What’ve you found?’
As she draws closer the dog tugs again at the object protruding from the mud, trying to pull it free.
‘Bob, you filthy brute, you’re covered. Let it go. Oh God, it’s not another dead sheep, is it?’
It’s the last heroic yank that sends the dog staggering back along the shore, something in its jaw. Triumphant, he scrambles up the bank to lay the object at the feet of his owner.
And as she stands, looking dumbstruck, the dog panting at her feet, the silence returns to the bay, like a tide coming in.
THE SOUND IS just an ordinary text alert, a quiet ‘beep beep’ in the night that does not wake Owen, and would not have woken me except that I was already awake, lying there, staring into the darkness, the baby at my breast snuffling, not quite feeding, not quite unlatching.
I lie there for a moment thinking about the text, wondering who it could be. Who’d be texting at this hour? None of my friends would be awake … unless it’s Milly gone into labour already … God, it can’t be Milly, can it? I’d promised to take Noah if Milly’s parents couldn’t get up from Devon in time to look after him but I never really thought …
I can’t quite reach the phone from where I’m lying, and at last I unlatch Freya with a finger in the corner of her mouth, and rock her gently onto her back, milk-sated, her eyes rolling back in her head like someone stoned. I watch her for a moment, my palm resting lightly on her firm little body, feeling the thrum of her heart in the birdcage of her chest as she settles, and then I turn to check my phone, my own heart quickening slightly like a faint echo of my daughter’s.
As I tap in my PIN, squinting slightly at the brightness of the screen, I tell myself to stop being silly – it’s four weeks until Milly’s due, it’s probably just a spam text, Have you considered claiming a refund for your payment protection insurance?
But, when I get the phone unlocked, it’s not Milly. And the text is only three words.
I need you.
It is 3.30 a.m., and I am very, very awake, pacing the cold kitchen floor, biting at my fingernails to try and quell the longing for a cigarette. I haven’t touched one for nearly ten years, but the need for one ambushes me at odd moments of stress and fear.
I need you.
I don’t need to ask what it means – because I know, just as I know who sent it, even though it’s from a number I don’t recognise.
Kate.
Kate Atagon.
Just the sound of her name brings her back to me, like a vivid rush – the smell of her soap, the freckles across the bridge of her nose, cinnamon against olive. Kate. Fatima. Thea. And me.
I close my eyes, and picture them all, the phone still warm in my pocket, waiting for the texts to come through.
Fatima will be lying asleep beside Ali, curled into his spine. Her reply will come around 6 a.m., when she gets up to make breakfast for Nadia and Samir and get them ready for school.
Thea – Thea is harder to picture. If she’s working nights she’ll be in the casino where phones are forbidden to staff, and shut up in lockers until their shifts are finished. She’ll roll off shift at eight in the morning, perhaps? Then she’ll have a drink with the other girls, and then she’ll reply, wired up with a successful night dealing with punters, collating chips, watching for card sharps and professional gamblers.
And Kate. Kate must be awake – she sent the text, after all. She’ll be sitting at her dad’s work table – hers now, I suppose – in the window overlooking the Reach, with the waters turning pale grey in the predawn light, reflecting the clouds and the dark hulk of the Tide Mill. She will be smoking, as she always did. Her eyes will be on the tides, the endlessly shifting, eddying tides, on the view that never changes and yet is never the same from one moment to the next – just like Kate herself.
Her long hair will be drawn back from her face, showing her fine bones, and the lines that thirty-two years of wind and sea have etched at the corners of her eyes. Her fingers will be stained with oil paint, ground into the cuticles, deep beneath the nails, and her eyes will be at their darkest slate blue, deep and unfathomable. She will be waiting for our replies. But she knows what we’ll say – what we’ve always said, whenever we’ve got that text, those three words.
I’m coming.
I’m coming.
I’m coming.
‘I’M COMING!’ I shout it up the stairs, as Owen calls something down above Freya’s sleepy squawking cries.
When I get up to the bedroom he’s holding her, pacing back and forth, his face still pink and crumpled from the pillow.
‘Sorry,’ he says, stifling a yawn. ‘I tried to calm her down but she wasn’t having any of it. You know what she’s like when she’s hungry.’
I crawl onto the bed and scoot backwards into the pillows until I’m sitting against the headboard and Owen hands me a red-faced indignant Freya who takes one affronted look up at me, and then lunges for my breast with a little grunt of satisfaction.
All is quiet, except for her greedy suckling. Owen yawns again, ruffles his hair, and looks at the clock, and then begins pulling on his underwear.
‘Are you getting up?’ I ask in surprise. He nods.
‘I might as well. No point in going back to sleep when I’ve got to get up at seven anyway. Bloody Mondays.’
I look at the clock. Six a.m. It’s later than I thought. I must have been pacing the kitchen for longer than I realised.
‘What were you doing up, anyway?’ he asks. ‘Did the bin lorry wake you?’
I shake my head.
‘No, I just couldn’t sleep.’
A lie. I’d almost forgotten how they feel on my tongue, slick and sickening. I feel the hard, warm bump of my phone in my dressing-gown pocket. I’m waiting for it to vibrate.
‘Fair enough.’ He suppresses another yawn and buttons up his shirt. ‘Want a coffee, if I put one on?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ I say. Then, just as he’s leaving the room, ‘Owen –’
But he’s already gone and he doesn’t hear me.
Ten minutes later he comes back with the coffee, and this time I’ve had time to practise my lines, work out what I’m going to say, and the semi-casual way I’m going to say it. Still I swallow and lick my lips, dry-mouthed with nerves.
‘Owen, I got a text from Kate yesterday.’
‘Kate from work?’ He puts the coffee down with a little bump; it slops slightly and I use the sleeve of my dressing gown to mop the puddle, protecting my book, giving me time to reply.
‘No, Kate Atagon. You know, I went to school with her?’
‘Oh, that Kate. The one who brought her dog to that wedding we went to?’
‘That’s right. Shadow.’
I think of him. Shadow – a white German shepherd with a black muzzle and soot-speckled back. I think of the way he stands in the doorway, growls at strangers, rolls his snowy belly up to those he loves.
‘So …?’ Owen prods, and I realise I’ve stopped talking, lost my thread.
‘Oh, right. So, she’s invited me to come and stay, and I thought I might go.’
‘Sounds like a nice idea. When would you go?’
‘Like … now. She’s invited me now.’
‘And Freya?’
‘I’d take her.’
Of course, I nearly add, but I don’t. Freya has never taken a bottle, in spite of a lot of trying on my part, and Owen’s. The one night I went out for a party she screamed solidly from 7.30 p.m. to 11.58 when I burst through the doors of the flat to snatch her out of Owen’s limp, exhausted arms.
There’s another silence. Freya leans her head back, watching me with a small frown, and then gives a quiet belch and returns to the serious business of getting fed. I can see thoughts flitting across Owen’s face … that he’ll miss us … that he’ll have the bed all to himself … lie-ins …
‘I could get on with decorating the nursery,’ he says at last. I nod, although this is the continuation of a long discussion between the two of us – Owen would like the bedroom, and me, back to himself and thinks that Freya will be going into her own room at six months. I … don’t. Which is partly why I’ve not found the time to clear the guest room of all our clutter and repaint it in baby-friendly colours.
‘Sure,’ I say.
‘Well, go for it, I reckon,’ Owen says at last. He turns away and begins sorting through his ties. ‘Do you want the car?’ he asks over his shoulder.
‘No, it’s fine. I’ll take the train. Kate will pick me up from the station.’
‘Are you sure? You won’t want to be lugging all Freya’s stuff on the train, will you? Is this straight?’
‘What?’ For a minute I’m not sure what he’s on about, and then I realise – the tie. ‘Oh, yes, it’s straight. No, honestly, I’m happy to take the train. It’ll be easier, I can feed Freya if she wakes up. I’ll just put all her stuff in the bottom of the pram.’ He doesn’t respond, and I realise he’s already running through the day ahead, ticking things off a mental check list just as I used to do a few months ago – only it feels like a different life. ‘OK, well, look, I might leave today if that’s all right with you.’
‘Today?’ He scoops his change off the chest of drawers and puts it in his pocket, and then comes over to kiss me goodbye on the top of my head. ‘What’s the hurry?’
‘No hurry,’ I lie. I feel my cheeks flush. I hate lying. It used to be fun – until I didn’t have a choice. I don’t think about it much now, perhaps because I’ve been doing it for so long, but it’s always there, in the background, like a tooth that always aches, and suddenly twinges with pain.
Most of all, though, I hate lying to Owen. Somehow I always managed to keep him out of the web, and now he’s being drawn in. I think of Kate’s text, sitting there on my phone, and it feels as if poison is leaching out of it, into the room – threatening to spoil everything.
‘It’s just Kate’s between projects, so it’s a good time for her and … well, I’ll be back at work in a few months so it feels like now’s as good a time as any.’
‘OK,’ he says, bemused but not suspicious. ‘Well, I guess I’d better give you a proper goodbye kiss then.’
He kisses me, properly, deeply, making me remember why I love him, why I hate deceiving him. Then he pulls away and kisses Freya. She swivels her eyes sideways to regard him dubiously, pausing in her feed for a moment, and then she resumes sucking with the single-minded determination that I love about her.
‘Love you too, little vampire,’ Owen says affectionately. Then, to me, ‘How long is the journey?’
‘Four hours maybe? Depends how the connections go.’
‘OK, well, have a great time, and text me when you get there. How long do you think you’ll stay?’
‘A few days?’ I hazard. ‘I’ll be back before the weekend.’ Another lie. I don’t know. I have no idea. As long as Kate needs me. ‘I’ll see when I get there.’
‘OK,’ he says again. ‘Love you.’
‘I love you too.’ And at last, that’s something I can tell the truth about.
I CAN REMEMBER to the day, almost to the hour and minute, the first time I met Kate. It was September. I was catching the train to Salten, an early one, so that I would arrive at the school in time for lunch.
‘Excuse me!’ I called nervously up the station platform, my voice reedy with anxiety. The girl ahead of me turned round. She was very tall and extremely beautiful, with a long, slightly haughty face like a Modigliani painting. Her waist-length black hair had been bleached gold at the tips, fading into the black, and her jeans were ripped across the thighs.
‘Yes?’
‘Excuse me, is this the train for Salten?’ I panted.
She looked me up and down, and I could feel her appraising me, taking in my Salten House uniform, the navy-blue skirt, stiff with newness, and the pristine blazer I had taken off its hanger for the first time that morning.
‘I don’t know,’ she said at last, turning to a girl behind her. ‘Kate, is this the Salten train?’
‘Don’t be a dick, Thee,’ the girl said. Her husky voice sounded too old for her – I didn’t think she could be more than sixteen or seventeen. She had light brown hair cut very short, framing her face, and when she smiled at me, the nutmeg freckles across her nose crinkled. ‘Yes, this is the Salten train. Make sure you get into the right half though, it divides at Hampton’s Lee.’
Then they turned, and were halfway up the platform before it occurred to me, I hadn’t asked which was the right half.
I looked up at the announcement board.
Use front seven carriages for stations to Salten, read the display, but what did ‘front’ mean? Front as in the closest to the ticket barrier, or front as in the direction of travel when the train left the station?
There were no officials around to ask, but the clock above my head showed only moments to spare, and in the end I got onto the farther end, where the two other girls had headed for, and dragged my heavy case after me into the carriage.
It was a compartment, just six seats, and all were empty. Almost as soon as I had slammed the door the guard’s whistle sounded, and, with a horrible feeling that I might be in the wrong part of the train completely, I sat down, the scratchy wool of the train seat harsh against my legs.
With a clank and a screech of metal on metal, the train drew out of the dark cavern of the station, the sun flooding the compartment with a suddenness that blinded me. I put my head back on the seat, closing my eyes against the glare, and as we picked up speed I found myself imagining what would happen if I didn’t turn up in Salten, where the housemistress would be awaiting me. What if I were swept off to Brighton or Canterbury, or somewhere else entirely? Or worse – what if I ended up split down the middle when the train divided, living two lives, each diverging from the other all the time, growing further and further apart from the me I should have become.
‘Hello,’ said a voice, and my eyes snapped open. ‘I see you made the train.’
It was the tall girl from the platform, the one the other had called Thee. She was standing in the doorway to my compartment, leaning against the wooden frame, twirling an unlit cigarette between her fingers.
‘Yes,’ I said, a little resentful that she and her friend had not waited to explain which end to get. ‘At least, I hope so. This is the right end for Salten, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ the girl said laconically. She looked me up and down again, tapped her unlit cigarette against the door frame, and then said, with an air of someone about to confer a favour, ‘Look, don’t think I’m being a bitch, but I just wanted to let you know, people don’t wear their uniforms on the train.’
‘What?’
‘They change into them at Hampton’s Lee. It’s … I don’t know. It’s just a thing. I thought I’d tell you. Only first years and new girls wear them for the whole journey. It kind of makes you stand out.’
‘So … you’re at Salten House too?’
‘Yup. For my sins.’
‘Thea got expelled,’ a voice said from behind her, and I saw that the other girl, the short-haired one, was standing in the corridor, balancing two cups of tea. ‘From three other schools. Salten’s her last-chance saloon. Nowhere else would take her.’
‘At least I’m not a charity case,’ Thea said, but I could tell from the way she said it that the two were friends, and this goading banter was part of their act. ‘Kate’s father is the art master,’ she told me. ‘So a free place for his daughter is all part of the deal.’
‘No chance of Thea qualifying for charity,’ Kate said. Silver spoon, she mouthed over the top of the teas, and winked. I tried not to smile.
She and Thea shared a look and I felt some wordless question and answer pass between them, and then Thea spoke.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Isa,’ I said.
‘Well, Isa. Why don’t you come and join me and Kate?’ She raised one eyebrow. ‘We’ve got a compartment just up the corridor.’
I took a deep breath and, with the feeling that I was about to step off a very high diving board, gave a short nod. As I picked up my case and followed Thea’s retreating back, I had no idea that that one simple action had changed my life forever.
IT’S STRANGE BEING back at Victoria. The Salten train is new, with open-plan carriages and automatic doors, not the old-fashioned slam-door thing we used to take to school, but the platform has hardly changed, and I realise that I have spent seventeen years unconsciously avoiding this place – avoiding everything associated with that time.
Balancing my takeaway coffee precariously in one hand, I heave Freya’s pram onto the train, dump my coffee on an empty table, and then there’s the same long struggling moment there always is, as I attempt to unclip the cot attachment – wrestling with clasps that won’t undo and catches that won’t let go. Thank God the train is quiet and the carriage almost empty, so I don’t have the usual hot embarrassment of people queueing in front or behind, or pushing past in the inadequate space. At last – just as the guard’s whistle sounds, and the train rocks and sighs and begins to heave out of the station – the final clip gives, and Freya’s cot jerks up, light in my hands. I stow her safely, still sleeping, opposite the table where I left my coffee.
I take my cup with me when I go back to sort out my bags. There are sharp images in my head – the train jerking, the hot coffee drenching Freya. I know it’s irrational – she’s on the other side of the aisle. But this is the person I’ve become since having her. All my fears – the ones that used to flit between dividing trains, and lift doors, and strange taxi drivers, and talking to people I didn’t know – all those anxieties have settled to roost on Freya.
At last we’re both comfortable, me with my book and my coffee, Freya asleep, with her blankie clutched to her cheek. Her face, in the bright June sunshine, is cherubic – her skin impossibly fine and clear – and I am flooded with a scalding drench of love for her, as painful and shocking as if that coffee had spilled across my heart. I sit, and for a moment I am nothing but her mother, and there is no one in the world except the two of us in this pool of sunshine and love.
And then I realise that my phone is buzzing.
Fatima Chaudhry says the screen. And my heart does a little jump.
I open it up, my fingers shaking.
I’m coming, it says. Driving down tonight when the kids are in bed. Will be with you 9/10ish.
So it’s begun. Nothing from Thea yet, but I know it will come. The spell has broken – the illusion that it’s just me and Freya, off on a seaside holiday for two. I remember why I am really here. I remember what we did.
I’m on the 12.05 from Victoria, I text back to the others. Pick me up from Salten, Kate?
No reply, but I know she won’t let me down.
I shut my eyes. I put my hand on Freya’s chest so I know she is there. And then I try to sleep.
I wake with a shock and a belting heart to the sound of crashing and shunting, and my first instinct is to reach out for Freya. For a minute I am not sure what has woken me but then I realise: the train is dividing, we are at Hampton’s Lee. Freya is squirming grumpily in her cot, she looks like she may settle if I’m lucky – but then there’s another shunt, more violent than the first set, and her eyes fly open in offended shock, her face crumpling in a sudden wail of annoyance and hunger.
‘Shh …’ I croon, scooping her up, warm and struggling from the cocoon of blankets and toys. ‘Shh … it’s OK, sweetie pie, it’s all right, my poppet. Nothing to worry about.’
She is dark-eyed and angry, bashing her cross little face against my chest as I get the buttons of my shirt undone and feel the by-now routine, yet always alien, rush of the milk letting down.
As she feeds, there is another bang and a crunch, and then a whistle blows, and we begin to move slowly out of the station, the platforms giving way to sidings, and then to houses, and then at last to fields and telegraph poles.
It is heart-stoppingly familiar. London, in all the years I’ve lived there, has been constantly changing. It’s like Freya, never the same from one day to the next. A shop opens here, a pub closes there. Buildings spring up – the Gherkin, the Shard – a supermarket sprawls across a piece of wasteland and apartment blocks seem to seed themselves like mushrooms, thrusting up from damp earth and broken concrete overnight.
But this line, this journey – it hasn’t changed at all.
There’s the burnt-out elm.
There’s the crumbling World War II pillbox.
There’s the rickety bridge, the train’s wheels sounding hollow above the void.
I shut my eyes, and I am back there in the compartment with Kate and Thea, laughing as they pull school skirts on over their jeans, button up shirts and ties over their summery vest tops. Thea was wearing stockings, I remember her rolling them up her impossibly long slender legs, and then reaching up beneath the regulation school skirt to fasten her suspenders. I remember the hot flush that stained my cheeks at the flash of her thigh, and looking away, out across the fields of autumn wheat, with my heart pounding as she laughed at my prudery.
‘You’d better hurry,’ Kate said lazily to Thea. She was dressed, and had packed her jeans and boots away in the case resting on the luggage rack. ‘We’ll be at Westridge soon, there’s always piles of beach-goers there, you don’t want to give a tourist a heart attack.’
Thea only stuck out her tongue, but she finished hooking her suspenders and smoothed down her skirt just as we pulled into Westridge station.
Sure enough, just as Kate had predicted, there was a scattering of tourists on the platform, and Thea let out a groan as the train drew to a halt. Our compartment door was level with a family of three beach-trippers, a mother, father and a little boy of about six with his bucket and spade in one hand, and a dripping choc ice in the other.
‘Room for three more?’ the father said jovially as he opened the door and they clambered in, slamming the door behind them. The little compartment felt suddenly very crowded.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Thea said, and she did sound sorry. ‘We’d love to have you, but my friend here,’ she indicated me, ‘she’s out on day release, and part of the terms of her probation is no contact with minors. The court judgement was very specific about that.’
The man blinked and his wife gave a nervous giggle. The boy wasn’t listening, he was busy picking bits of chocolate off his T-shirt.
‘It’s your child I’m thinking of,’ Thea said seriously. ‘Plus of course Ariadne really doesn’t want to go back to the young offenders’ institute.’
‘There’s an empty compartment next door,’ Kate said, and I could see she was trying to keep her face straight. She stood and slid open the door to the corridor. ‘I’m so sorry. We don’t want to inconvenience you, but I think it’s for the best, for everyone’s safety.’
The man shot us all a suspicious look, and then ushered his wife and little boy out into the corridor.
Thea burst into snorts of laughter as they left, barely waiting even until the compartment door had slid shut, but Kate was shaking her head.
‘You do not get a point for that,’ she said. Her face was twisted with suppressed laughter. ‘They didn’t believe you.’
‘Oh, come on!’ Thea took a cigarette out of a packet in her blazer pocket and lit it, taking a deep drag in defiance of the ‘No Smoking’ sign on the window. ‘They left, didn’t they?’
‘Yes, but only because they thought you were a fucking weirdo. That doesn’t count!’
‘Is … is this a game?’ I said uncertainly.
There was a long pause.
Thea and Kate looked at each other, and I saw that wordless communication pass between them again, like an electric charge flowing from one to another, as if they were deciding how to answer. And then Kate smiled, a small, almost secretive smile, and leaned forward across the gap between the bench seats, so close that I could see the dark streaks in her grey-blue eyes.
‘It’s not a game,’ she said. ‘It’s the game. It’s the Lying Game.’
The Lying Game.
It comes back to me now as sharp and vivid as the smell of the sea, and the scream of gulls over the Reach, and I can’t believe that I had almost forgotten it – forgotten the tally sheet Kate kept above her bed, covered with cryptic marks for her complex scoring system. This much for a new victim. That much for complete belief. The extras awarded for elaborate detail, or managing to rehook someone who had almost called your bluff. I haven’t thought of it for so many years, but in a way, I’ve been playing it all this time.
I sigh, and look down at Freya’s peaceful face as she suckles, her complete absorption in the moment of it all. And I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I can go back.
What has happened, to make Kate call us so suddenly and so urgently in the middle of the night?
I can only think of one thing … and I can’t bear to believe it.
It is just as the train is drawing into Salten that my phone beeps for the last time, and I draw it out, thinking it will be Kate confirming my lift. But it’s not. It’s Thea.
I’m coming.
THE PLATFORM AT Salten is almost empty. As the sound of the train dies away, the peace of the countryside rolls back in, and I can hear the noises of Salten in summer – crickets chirping, the sound of birds, the faraway noise of a combine harvester across the fields. Always before when I arrived here there would be the Salten House minibus waiting, with its navy and ice-blue livery. Now the car park is hot dust and emptiness, and there is no one here, not even Kate.
I wheel Freya down the platform towards the exit, my heavy bag weighing down one shoulder, and wondering what to do. Phone Kate? I should have confirmed the time with her. I’d been assuming she got my message, but what if her phone was out of charge? There’s no landline at the Mill anyway, no other number I can try.
I put the brake on the pram, and then pull out my phone to check for text messages and find out the time. I’m just tapping in my code when I hear the roar of an engine, funnelled by the sunken lanes, and I turn to see a car pulling into the station car park. I was expecting it to be the huge disreputable Land Rover Kate drove down to Fatima’s wedding seven years ago, with its long bench seats and Shadow sticking his head out of the window, tongue flapping. But it’s not. It’s a taxi. For a minute I’m not sure if it’s her, and then I see her, struggling with the rear passenger door, and my heart does a little flip-flop, and I’m no longer a Civil Service lawyer and a mother, I’m just a girl, running down the platform towards my friend.
‘Kate!’
She’s exactly the same. Same slim, bony wrists, same nut-brown hair and honey-coloured skin, her nose still tip-tilted and sprinkled with freckles. Her hair is longer now, held back in a rubber band, and there are lines in the fine skin around her eyes and mouth, but otherwise she is Kate, my Kate, and as we hug, I inhale, and her own particular scent of cigarettes and turpentine and soap is just as I remember. I hold her at arm’s length and find myself grinning, stupidly, in spite of everything.
‘Kate,’ I repeat, foolishly, and she pulls me into another hug, her face in my hair, squeezing me so I can feel her bones.
And then I hear a squawk and I remember who I am, the person I’ve become – and all that’s passed since Kate and I last met.
‘Kate,’ I say again, the sound of her name on my tongue so perfect, ‘Kate, come and meet my daughter.’
I pull back the sun shade, and pick up the wriggling cross little bundle, and hold her out.
Kate takes her, with an expression full of trepidation, and then her thin, mobile face breaks into a smile.
‘You’re beautiful,’ she says to Freya, and her voice is soft and husky just as I remember. ‘Just like your mum. She’s lovely, Isa.’
‘Isn’t she?’ I look at Freya, staring up, bemused, into Kate’s face, blue eyes fixed on blue eyes. She reaches out a chubby hand towards Kate’s hair, but then stops, mesmerised by some quality of the light. ‘She’s got Owen’s eyes,’ I say. I always longed for blue eyes as a child.
‘Come on,’ Kate says at last, speaking to Freya, not me. She takes Freya’s hand, her fingers stroking the silken baby pudge, the dimpled knuckles. ‘Let’s get going.’
‘What happened to your car?’ I say as we walk towards the taxi, Kate holding Freya, me pushing the pram, with the bag inside it.
‘Oh, it’s broken down again. I’ll get it fixed but I’ve got no money as usual.’
‘Oh, Kate.’
Oh, Kate, when are you going to get a proper job? I could ask. When are you going to sell the Mill, go somewhere people appreciate your work instead of relying on the dwindling supply of tourists who want to holiday in Salten? But I know the answer. Never. Kate will never leave the Tide Mill. Never leave Salten.
‘Back to the Mill, ladies?’ the taxi driver calls out his window, and Kate nods.
‘Thanks, Rick.’
‘I’ll sling the pram in the back for you,’ he says, getting out. ‘Folds, does it?’
‘Yes.’ I’m struggling with the clips again, and then I realise. ‘Damn, I forgot the car seat. I brought the cot attachment instead – I was thinking she could sleep in it.’
‘Ah, we won’t see no police down here,’ Rick says comfortably, pushing the boot shut on the folded pram. ‘’Cept Mary’s boy, and he’s not going to arrest one of my passengers.’
It wasn’t the police I was worried about, but the name snags at me, distracting me.
‘Mary’s boy?’ I look at Kate. ‘Not Mark Wren?’
‘The very same,’ Kate says, with a dry smile, so that her mouth creases at one side. ‘Sergeant Wren, now.’
‘I can’t believe he’s old enough!’
‘He’s only a couple of years younger than us,’ Kate points out, and I realise she’s right. Thirty is plenty old enough to be a policeman. But I can’t think of Mark Wren as a thirty-year-old man – I think of him as a fourteen-year-old kid with acne and a fluffy upper lip, stooping to try to hide his six-foot-two frame. I wonder if he still remembers us. If he remembers the Game.
‘Sorry,’ Kate says as we buckle in. ‘Hold her on your lap – I know it’s not ideal.’
‘I’ll drive careful,’ Rick says, as we bounce off out of the rutted car park and into the sunken lane. ‘And besides, it’s only a few miles.’
‘Less across the marsh,’ Kate says. She squeezes my hand and I know she’s thinking of all the times she and I made that trip, picking our way across the salt marsh to school and back. ‘But we couldn’t do that with the buggy.’
‘Hot for June, in’t it?’ Rick says conversationally as we round the corner, and the trees break into a flash of bright dappled sunlight, hot on my face. I blink, wondering if I packed my sunglasses.
‘Scorching,’ I say. ‘It wasn’t nearly so warm in London.’
‘So what brings you back then?’ Rick’s eyes meet mine in the mirror. ‘You was at school with Kate, that right?’
‘That’s right,’ I say. And then I stop. What did bring me back? A text? Three words? I meet Kate’s eyes and I know there’s nothing she can say now, not in front of Rick.
‘Isa’s come down for the reunion,’ Kate says unexpectedly. ‘At Salten House.’
I blink, and she gives my hand a warning clasp, but then we bump across the level crossing, the car shaking and bouncing over the rails, and I have to let go to hold Freya with both hands.
‘Very posh them Salten House dinners, so I hear,’ Rick says. ‘My youngest does a bit of waitressing up there for pocket money, and I hear all sorts. Canopies, champagne, the works.’
‘I’ve never been to one before,’ Kate says. ‘But it’s fifteen years since our class graduated, and I thought this year might be the one to go to.’
Fifteen? For a minute I think she’s got the maths wrong, but then I realise. It’s seventeen years since we left, after GCSEs, but if we’d stayed on for sixth form, she’d be right. For the rest of our class it will be their fifteen-year anniversary.
We swing round the corner of the lane and I hold Freya tighter, my heart in my mouth, wishing I’d brought the car seat. It was stupid of me not to think of it.
‘You come down here much?’ Rick says to me in the mirror.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I – I haven’t been back for a while. You know what it’s like.’ I shift awkwardly in the seat, knowing I am gripping Freya too tight, but unable to loosen my hold. ‘It’s hard to find the time.’
‘Beautiful bit of the world,’ Rick throws back. ‘I can’t imagine living anywhere else meself, but I suppose it’s different if you wasn’t born and bred here. Where are your parents from?’
‘They are – were –’ I stumble, and I feel Kate’s supportive presence at my side and take a breath. ‘My father lives in Scotland now, but I grew up in London.’
We rattle over a cattle grid, and then the trees open up and we are out on the marsh.
And suddenly it’s there. The Reach. Wide and grey and speckled with reeds, the wind-rippled waters reflecting the lazy streaks of sun-bleached cloud above, and the whole thing is so bright and clear and wide that I feel a lump in my throat.
Kate is watching my face, and I see her smile.
‘Had you forgotten?’ she asks softly. I shake my head.
‘Never.’ But it’s not true – I had forgotten. I had forgotten what it was like. There is nothing, nowhere like the Reach. I have seen many rivers, crossed other estuaries. But none as beautiful as this, where the land and the sky and the sea bleed into one another, soaking each other, mingling and mixing until it’s hard to know which is which, where the clouds end and the water starts.
The road is dwindling down to a single lane, and then to a pebbled track, with grass between the tyre marks.
And then I see it – the Tide Mill; a black silhouette against the cloud-streaked water, even shabbier and more drunken than I remember. It’s not a building so much as a collection of driftwood thrown together by the winds, and looking as if it might be torn apart by them at any point. My heart lurches in my chest and the memories come unbidden, beating at the inside of my head with feathered wings.
Thea, swimming naked in the Reach in the sunset, her skin turned gold in the evening light, the long black shadows of the stunted trees cutting across the flame-coloured water and turning the Reach to tiger-striped glory.
Kate, hanging out of the Mill window on a winter’s morning, when the frost was thick on the inside of the glass and furring the reeds and bulrushes, throwing open her arms and roaring her white breath to the sky.
Fatima, lying out on the wooden jetty in her tiny bathing suit, her skin turned mahogany with the summer sun and a pair of giant sunglasses reflecting the flickering light off the waves as she basked in the heat.
And Luc – Luc – but here my heart contracts and I can’t go on.
We have come to a barred gate across the track.
‘Better stop here,’ Kate says to Rick. ‘We had a high tide last night and the ground up ahead is still soft.’
‘You sure?’ He turns to look over his shoulder. ‘I don’t mind giving it a whirl.’
‘No, we’ll walk.’ She reaches for the door handle, and holds out a tenner, but he waves it away.
‘Your money’s no good here, duck.’
‘But, Rick –’
‘But, Rick, nothing. Your dad was a good man, no matter what others in this place say, and you done well to stick it out here with the gossips. Pay me another day.’
Kate swallows, and I can see she is trying to speak, but can’t, and so I speak for her.
‘Thank you, Rick,’ I say. ‘But I want to pay. Please.’
And I hold out ten pounds of my own.
Rick hesitates, and I put it in the ashtray and get out of the car, holding Freya in my arms while Kate retrieves my bag and the buggy from the boot. At last, when Freya is safely strapped in, he nods.
‘All right. But listen, you ladies need a lift anywhere, you call me, understand? Day or night. I don’t like to think of you out here with no transport. That place,’ he jerks his head at the Mill, ‘is going to fall down one of these days, and if you need a ride somewhere, you don’t hesitate to call me, tenner or no tenner. Got it?’
‘Got it,’ I say, and I nod.
There is something comforting in the thought.
AFTER RICK DRIVES away, we look at each other, each unaccountably tongue-tied, feeling the hot sun beating down on the top of our heads. I want to ask Kate about the message, but something is stopping me.
Before I have made up my mind to speak, Kate turns and opens the gate, closing it behind us, as I make my way down towards the short wooden walkway that joins the Tide Mill to the shore.
The Mill itself sits on a little spit of sand, barely bigger than the building itself, which I suppose was once joined to the bank. At some point, when the Mill was being constructed, a narrow channel was dug away, severing the Mill from the land and funnelling the rising and falling tide past the water wheel that used to sit in the channel. The wheel is long gone, only a stump of blackened wood sticking out at right angles from the wall shows where it once stood, and in its place is the wooden walkway, bridging the ten feet of water that separates the Mill from the shore. Seventeen years ago I remember running across it, all four of us at once sometimes, but now I can’t quite believe we trusted our weight to it.
It is narrower than I remember, the slats salt-bleached and rotten in places, and no handrail has been installed in the years since I last saw it, but Kate starts across it fearlessly, carrying my bag. I take a deep breath, trying to ignore the images in my head (slats giving way, the pram falling into the salt water), and I follow, my heart in my throat as I bounce the wheels across the treacherous gaps, only exhaling when we reach the comparative safety of the other side.
The door is unlocked, as it always is, always was. Kate turns the handle and stands back, letting me pass – and I wheel Freya up the wooden step and inside.
It’s seven years since I last saw Kate, but I have not been back to Salten for more than twice that. For a moment it is like I have stepped back in time, and I am fifteen, the ramshackle beauty of the place washing over me for the first time. I see again the long, asymmetrical windows with their cracked panes, overlooking the estuary, the vaulted roof that goes up and up to the blackened beams above, the staircase drunkenly twisting around the space, hopping from landing to rickety landing, past the bedrooms, until it reaches the attic lodged high in the rafters. I see the smoke-blacked stove with its snaking pipe, and the low sofa with its broken springs, and most of all the paintings, paintings everywhere. Some I don’t recognise, they must be Kate’s, but intermingled are a hundred that are like old friends or half-remembered names.
There, above the rust-stained sink in a gilt frame is Kate as a baby, her face round with chub, her concentration fierce as she reaches for something just out of view.
There, hanging between the two long windows is the unfinished canvas of the Reach on a winter’s morning, crackling with frost, and a single heron swooping low above the water.
Beside the door that leads to the outside toilet is a watercolour of Thea, her features dissolving at the edges of the rough paper.
And over the desk I catch sight of a pencil sketch of me and Fatima, arms entwined in a makeshift hammock, laughing, laughing, like there is nothing to fear in all the world.
It’s like a thousand memories assault me all at once, each of them with clutching fingers pulling me back into the past – and then I hear a loud bark, and I look down to see Shadow, bounding up to me, a flurry of white and grey. I fend him off, patting his head as he butts it against my leg, but he is not part of the past, and the spell is broken.
‘It hasn’t changed!’ I say, knowing I sound foolish. Kate shrugs, and begins to unbuckle Freya from her pram.
‘It has a bit. I had to replace the fridge.’ She nods at one in the corner, which looks if anything older and more disreputable than its predecessor. ‘And I had to sell a lot of Dad’s best paintings of course. I filled the gaps with mine, but they’re not the same. I had to sell some of my favourites – the plover’s skeleton, and the one of the greyhound on the sands … but the rest, I couldn’t bear to let these go.’
She looks over the top of Freya’s head at the pictures that remain, and her gaze caresses each one.
I take Freya from her arms, and bounce her over my shoulder, not saying what I am thinking, which is that the place feels like a museum, like those rooms in the houses of famous men, frozen at the moment they left it. Marcel Proust’s bedroom, faithfully reconstructed in the Musée Carnavalet. Kipling’s study preserved in aspic at Bateman’s.
Only here there are no ropes to hold the viewer back, only Kate, living on, in this memorial to her father.
To hide my thoughts I walk to the window, patting Freya’s warm, firm back, more to soothe myself than her, and I stare out over the Reach. The tide is low, but the wooden jetty overlooking the bay is only a few feet above the lapping waves, and I turn back to Kate, surprised.
‘Has the jetty sunk?’
‘Not just the jetty,’ Kate says ruefully. ‘That’s the problem. The whole place is sinking. I had a surveyor come and look at it, he said there’s no proper foundations, and that if I were applying for a mortgage today I’d never get one.’
‘But – wait, hang on, what do you mean? Sinking? Can’t you repin it? – underpin, that’s what I mean. Can’t you do that?’
‘Not really. The problem is it’s just sand underneath us. There’s nothing for the underpinning to rest on. You could postpone the inevitable, but eventually it’s just going to wash away.’
‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
‘Not really. I mean, yes, it’s causing some movement in the upper storeys, which is making the floor a bit uneven, but it’s not going to disappear tonight if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s more stuff like the electrics.’
‘What?’ I stare at the light switch on the wall, as if expecting sparks to start flying at any moment. Kate laughs.
‘Don’t worry, I had a massive fuck-off circuit-breaker installed when things started getting dicey. If anything starts to fizz it just trips. But it does mean that the lights have a tendency to go off at high tide.’
‘This place can’t possibly be insured.’
‘Insured?’ She looks at me like I’ve said something quaint and eccentric. ‘What the hell would I do with insurance?’
I shake my head, wondering.
‘What are you doing here? Kate, this is mad. You can’t live like this.’
‘Isa,’ she says patiently, ‘I can’t leave. How could I? It’s completely unsaleable.’
‘So don’t sell it – walk away. Give the keys to the bank. Declare yourself bankrupt if that’s what it takes.’
‘I can’t leave,’ she says stubbornly, and goes across to the stove to turn the handle on the gas bottle and light the little burner. The kettle on top starts to hiss quietly as she gets out two mugs, and a battered canister of tea. ‘You know why.’
And I can’t answer that because I do. I know exactly why. And it’s the very reason I’ve come back here myself.
‘Kate,’ I say, feeling my insides tighten queasily. ‘Kate – that message …’
‘Not now,’ she says. Her back is towards me, and I can’t see her face. ‘I’m sorry, Isa, I just – it wouldn’t be fair. We need to wait, until the others are here.’
‘OK,’ I say quietly. But suddenly, I’m not. Not really.
FATIMA IS THE next to arrive.
It is almost dusk; a warm sluggish breeze filters through the open windows as I turn the pages of a novel, trying to distract myself from my imaginings. Part of me wants to shake Kate, force the truth out of her. But another part of me – and it’s equally big – is afraid to face what’s coming.
For the moment, this moment, everything is peaceful, me with my book, Freya snoozing in her buggy, Kate at the stove, salt-savoury smells rising up from the frying pan balanced on top of the burner. There’s a part of me that wants to hold on to that for as long as possible. Perhaps, if we don’t talk about it, we can pretend that this is just what I told Owen – old friends meeting up.
There is a hiss from the pan, making me jump, and at the same time Shadow gives a staccato series of barks. Turning my head, I hear the sound of tyres turning off the main road onto the track that leads down by the Reach.
I get up from my window seat and open the door to the landward side of the Mill, and there, lights streaming out across the marsh, is a big black 4x4 bumping down the track, music blaring, sending marsh birds flapping and wheeling in alarm. It gets closer, and closer, and then comes to a halt with a crunch of stones and a creak of the handbrake. The engine turns off, and the silence abruptly returns.
‘Fatima?’ I call, and the driver’s door opens, and then I am running across the jetty to meet her. On the shore, she throws her arms around me in a hug so hard I almost forget to breathe.