The Way Back Home
Freya North
The unforgettable, poignant new novel from Sunday Times bestseller Freya North.Born and brought up in an artists’ commune in Derbyshire, Oriana Taylor had freedom at her fingertips in a home full of extraordinary people. The Bedwell brothers, Malachy and Jed, shared their childhood and adolescence with Oriana. In the rambling old house and tangled grounds, their dreams and desires could run free.But too much freedom comes at a price. Something happened the summer they were fifteen. And now, having been gone eighteen years, Oriana is back.This is their story.
Praise for The Way Back Home (#ulink_37be2068-0491-525f-8b3f-6450d1e133b9)
‘Brimming with emotional drama and packing a huge twist, this story will keep you guessing until the very end’ Heat
‘I was gripped from the start and raced through to the end in one long sitting’ Sara Lawrence, Daily Mail
‘A lovely read that keeps you anticipating a twist that is nicely unexpected … I couldn’t put it down‘ Sarah Broadhurst, Lovereading.co.uk (http://www.Lovereading.co.uk)
‘A very telling and enjoyable take on contemporary life’ Woman and Home
‘If you like emotional family dramas with a twist you’ll love this’ Daily Express
‘Freya North has given us another poignant tale – you won’t be able to put this one down’ OK
‘An intriguing tale that keeps you absorbed from cover to cover.’ Candis Magazine
‘It is a story of reflection and redemption – a tender tale that seems to have come from the very heart of this author’ New Books Magazine
‘Packed with love, lies and drama’ Woman Magazine
Acclaim for Freya North
‘Secrets will make you smile, sigh and cheer as this story proves love can be found in the most unexpected places’ Sunday Express
‘Darkly funny and sexy – literary escapism at its very finest’ Sunday Independent
‘The novel’s likeable central characters are so well painted that you feel not only that you know them, but that you know how right they are for each other … the beauty of the North Yorkshire countryside contrasts convincingly with the bustle of London’ Daily Telegraph
‘Freya North has matured to produce an emotivenovel that deals with the darker side of love – theseare real women, with real feelings’ She
‘A delicious creation … sparkling in every sense’ Daily Express
‘A distinctive storytelling style and credible, loveable characters … an addictive read that encompasses the stuff life is made of: love, sex, fidelity and, above all, friendship’ Glamour
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_6a9b7843-5130-5d24-a5c4-cb936fd79022)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Freya North 2014
‘The Waste Land’ © Estate of T.S. Eliot printed with permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
Don’t You Cry
Words & Music by Richard Hawley
© Copyright 2009 Universal Music Publishing MGB Limited
Universal Music Publishing MGB Limited
All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.
Used by permission of Music Sales Limited.
Cover photography © Paul Knight/ Trevillion
Images (main image); Getty Images (girl, path)
Freya North asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007517800
Ebook Edition © May/June 2014 ISBN: 9780007507696
Version: 2016-11-11
DEDICATION (#ulink_0b2de3f8-be93-5bea-ad24-b370a492d8d0)
In loving memory of Hannah Berry 1983-2013
Beautiful, funny and brave. We miss you.
www.beatingbowelcancer.org (http://www.beatingbowelcancer.org)
CONTENTS
Cover (#uc2d31c6f-fa71-5734-92e9-fe93c66c7102)
Praise for The Way Back Home (#u243c0a72-fdee-547e-af2f-ad720f2ddbce)
Title Page (#u9779015a-78c2-522d-8884-805d5a6eb4fe)
Copyright (#u6e582ded-4e2a-5269-a408-cbaf00882131)
Dedication (#u7124cb76-d2e4-5aff-81ef-897def7bf66b)
Chapter One (#u7aa83192-7f44-5f94-9263-e88803a55266)
Chapter Two (#ufb11f2a4-d5a7-5cec-a3f4-5259fb26309c)
Chapter Three (#u2de3246c-ea27-51c8-bd0c-595979652989)
Chapter Four (#u1f50dadd-5ef8-5273-97b7-991323c8af85)
Chapter Five (#u8c007034-8de5-58d2-ad3a-ef69b36d461c)
Chapter Six (#u9042ed4b-38a1-5c83-b763-7926b6420105)
Chapter Seven (#u65d57f04-81c8-5b06-9f5a-8cd9f815c643)
Chapter Eight (#u86465161-d76c-51cb-9a37-bf15bb052381)
Chapter Nine (#ue1a8437a-5945-5773-a4d8-6d057d5f7fe4)
Chapter Ten (#u58df961c-4254-5ef6-8dfd-82204e88a02d)
Chapter Eleven (#u3243d021-d93f-5670-883e-25a69b838d14)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Reading Group Questions (#litres_trial_promo)
Q&A With Freya North (#litres_trial_promo)
The Story of Windward (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
When I was …
When I was born there were already other children at Windward. None was beyond toddling age and, as such, we were grouped together pretty much like the clumps of perennials in the garden, or the globs of paint on a palette in one of the studios, or the music which drifted from the top rooms – discordant notes that, as a whole, wove together into a quirky harmony of sorts. We were who we were, the children of Windward – a little ragtaggle tribe further defining the ethos and eccentricity of the place.
I wasn’t born in a hospital. I was born at Windward but I wasn’t born in my home. I was born in Lilac and George’s apartment with Jette assisting my mother, ably helped by all the other females there at the time, whether permanent or itinerant, mothers or girls, lesbians, lapsed nuns and even an aged virgin. I know all about a woman called Damisi who was visiting at the time though, it seems, no one really knew where her connection lay. She was a doula, apparently, and I know the story off by heart – how she had all the women breathing and bellowing to support and inspire my mother to relax. It worked – I know I was as easy a birth as it’s possible to have, slipping out into the Windward world to a backing track that was practically a bovine opera. Some of the other children heard – how could they not – and often, they mooed at me. I didn’t mind – it seemed my own special herald. However, when I first heard a similar sound emitted by a cow it scared me senseless.
When I was five, Louis, who was always very old but never seemed to age, hosted my birthday party in his apartment. We didn’t know he knew magic. He took pennies from behind all our ears – it was probably the first time any of us had coins of our own. He gave me a piggy bank to keep mine in – to start saving the pennies, he explained. I thought I had to save the coins from some fate that would otherwise befall them.
When I was ten, my birthday party was a disaster. I’d been at the local school for three years, been to the parties of my classmates – pink and proper, simultaneously joyous and lively and yet fastidiously organized. That’s all I wanted – a party like that. A neat cake with the right number of candles. My parents got it wrong. There were only nine candles. Someone – probably my mother – had put a tenth one in, but had decided that it was incorrect. Ten? That’s wrong. That small dent in the beige icing of my lopsided, inedible cake was to me a sinkhole of indifference. It struck me then that perhaps not everyone loved everyone.
When I was fifteen –
When I was fifteen something terrible happened.
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_a66c986f-27c7-5037-be0b-638483828eaf)
Oriana
To Oriana, it seemed so small. So ridiculously and unnervingly small that she felt compelled to rub her eyes. It had to be an illusion – the truer, more sensible, more realistic proportions would surely be reinstated after a good blink. But there it was still, nestled in a fold of land which looked soft enough to be made of fabric. Like biscuit crumbs in a scrunched napkin, there was the small town outside which she’d grown up. She pulled the hire car in to the verge. She didn’t want to get out, she wanted to avoid familiar smells that might make it seem real. She didn’t want to hear anything that might say well! welcome back, duck. She wanted to believe that she had no history with this mini place and no need of it. It looked silly, being so small. Not worth a detour. Certainly not worth a visit. Not worthy, even, of a drive right through. This wasn’t Lilliput. This wasn’t romantic. This was Nowhere. Nowhere, also known as Blenthrop, Derbyshire. The worst thing about this bastard place striking Oriana as being so small was that it made the rest of the world feel so vast. And suddenly she felt isolated, acutely alone and terrifyingly far away from the place she’d called home for so many years, the place she’d left only the previous day. God Bless America, she said under her breath though she knew she’d never go back.
Driving to her mother’s house was easier because she’d never lived there. There was little to recognize, nothing to flinch at; she was unknown and that was preferable to intrusive welcomes and waves, however warm and well meaning Blenthrop folk might be. The further she drove from her childhood home, the longer the space she could finally create between her ears and her shoulders. As she relaxed a little, the car seat felt more comfortable and her headache lifted. Really, jet lag had nothing to do with the tension and now that the anxiety had dissipated, Oriana let the genuine tiredness billow over her the way her mother used to waft her duvet when she was a little girl, giggling in bed waiting for it to land. They call it a comforter in the United States, she thought. My mum’s gone all sheets and blankets because she says it makes the bed look ‘properly made’. My mom – the all-American girl who’s now as small-town English as they come.
The tiredness, the tiredness. Should she pull over? Half an hour left to Hathersage. Open the window. Turn the radio up another notch. Drink Coke. Pinch yourself awake. Pinch yourself that you really are here again, eighteen years on. Kick yourself, wondering if it’s a stupid idea, really.
* * *
Oriana’s mother didn’t know what to do. Her daughter was sleeping and though she’d told her mother not to let her, under any circumstances, what was Rachel to do? Her daughter, wan and sunken-eyed, too thin. Rachel looked in at the front room. Oriana was curled embryonically into a corner of the sofa, her hands tucked tightly between her thighs, the tips of her socks hanging limply a little way off her toes; the heel of her right sock was twisted to her ankle, as if her shoe had wanted to cling onto her feet. Her hair looked lank and flat and her lips were chapped. She wasn’t wearing earrings. She’d spilled something on her top. This wasn’t jet lag, Rachel sensed. This was exhaustion.
Rachel had done that trip back to America often enough since she herself emigrated from there aged nineteen. She knew well that, though jet lag made you feel discombobulated, it didn’t make you look like that – how Oriana had looked on arriving an hour ago. When Rachel had opened the door to her daughter, she read in half a glance all the unrevealed secrets and sadness that had slipped unnoticed between the lines of her sporadic emails. On her doorstep, Rachel saw how the crux of it all was suddenly writ large over Oriana’s face, her general scrawniness. The details, however, remained concealed. She was shocked. How could she have known nothing? She was ashamed that, once again, a mother’s instinct had failed her.
‘I’ll give her another ten minutes,’ Rachel said, unsure.
‘That’ll make it forty winks,’ Bernard said. ‘I’ll be popping out now. Just round the block.’ And he kissed his wife who, just then, really did love his habit of explaining life with sayings and clichés. Bernard Safely. Had ever a person had a more appropriate surname?
‘Two shakes,’ Bernard told her though they both knew that his walk around the block would take far longer than two shakes of a lamb’s tail. She watched him through the bubbled-glass panel of the front door as he walked away. The distortion made him appear to have no bones, amorphous as jelly. Her ex-husband, Oriana’s father, referred to Bernard as spineless. Through the warped glass, he did indeed look so. Rachel felt disloyal. She rarely thought about Robin these days. She supposed she’d have to, now Oriana was back, even if she didn’t want to. She’d see him in her daughter’s crooked smile, her high cheekbones, the way her gaze darted away while she talked but focused fixedly on whoever spoke to her. Father and daughter both had the ability, without realizing it, to make one feel simultaneously inconsequential and significant.
‘Oriana Taylor,’ Rachel said quietly and then, in a whisper, ‘Oriana Safely.’
It didn’t flow. It didn’t work. It would never have worked. She’d always be Oriana Taylor, daughter of Robin. The Robin Taylor. Would they mention him? She and her daughter had managed for eighteen years to skirt issues as if they were dog mess on the pavement.
* * *
Malachy
An ex-girlfriend had described it as Saturn Returns. Malachy hadn’t a clue what she meant. That dream you have, she’d said, you might not have it often but it’ll always recur – like Saturn Returns, with similar cataclysmic fallout. It makes you introverted and horrid to be around.
He’d ended the relationship soon after. She was a bit too cosmic for Malachy and she talked too much anyway. If he had the dream, the last thing he needed was a load of astrobabble bullshit. A warm body cuddling next to him, soothing him, taking his mind off it – that’s what he required. Saturn Returns. She never knew that a prog-rock band of that very name had formed in his childhood home, exploded onto the music scene for a couple of years in the late 1970s and then finally imploded back at the house in 1981. He never told her, even though the band had jammed in the very place where Malachy currently lived.
Last night, the dream had once again hijacked his sleep, apropos of nothing. In the woods, with his brother Jed, their teenage bodies of twenty years ago encasing their current souls. They were out at summer dusk, shooting rabbits. A large buck running away, stopping, turning and facing him. Delicate eyes and soft silver pelt conflicting with the anomalous fuck-you gesture of lope-long ears rigid like two-fingered abuse. Malachy pulled the trigger and smelt the saltpetre and heard the harsh crack and felt the kick and experienced the extreme pain as half his world went dark.
He’d often wondered whether the rabbit was some kind of metaphor. He’d tried to analyse why in the dream he didn’t shout for help; why his brother was there only at the start. And he never knew whether he killed the rabbit, the little fucker. The pain cut the dream short, always. And he always woke up thinking, but it didn’t happen like that, it didn’t happen like that. And he’d be cranky and introverted for a good while after because he knew that he’d much rather it had happened like in the dream.
Stupid dream. Malachy left his bed and showered. Dressed, he snatched breakfast, yesterday’s post in one hand, toast in the other. What he really wanted to do today was write his novel, not go to work. Business was slack this time of year – early March, thick frost, too cold for tourists, too close to Easter for more hardy holidaymakers; too close to Christmas and Valentine’s and Mother’s Day for locals to fritter any more of their money. The irony was Malachy could very well not open the gallery because, after all, he owned it – but the fact that he owned it compelled him to keep it open, never take time off, never get sick. Tuesday to Friday, 10 till 6. Saturday 10 till 5. Summer Sundays 11 till 2. Closed Mondays. If the gallery was as quiet as he anticipated, he’d work on his novel from there today. He left the apartment, glancing guiltily at the house. He ought to do the rounds, really. He hadn’t done so for a couple of days.
Paula de la Mare waved at him, before she hopped into her car, belting down the drive. Malachy followed, absent-mindedly creating acronyms from the letters on her car’s registration plate. At the bottom of the drive, she turned right, taking her girls to school. Malachy followed her a little way before joining the main road into Blenthrop.
Some idiot had dumped litter in the doorway of the White Peak Art Space; yesterday’s chips lay like flaccid fingers in the scrunch of sodden paper. He rummaged in his satchel for something suitable like a plastic bag. Phone. An apple. Slim leather diary (he refused to use his phone for anything other than calls). A tin of pencils, a spiral-bound notebook and a flashdrive. He had no plastic bag. The toe of his shoe would have to do. He shoved the takeaway detritus into the gutter and opened up the gallery.
It was always the weirdest feeling. It never diminished and it engulfed Malachy the moment he entered. The immediate stillness and quiet of the space contradicted by the undeniable sensation that, up until that very moment, they’d been alive; the paintings, the sculptures. If he’d turned up a minute earlier, or sneaked in through the back, he was certain he’d have caught them at it. Now, as every day, they were just figures frozen into their canvases, others quite literally turned to stone, bronze or, in the case of Dan Markson’s work, multicoloured polymer. It was like the characters in his novel – Malachy sensed they existed without him but whenever he returned to the manuscript, he found them exactly where he’d left them.
In the gallery, he straightened a couple of frames and adjusted the angle of a spotlight that was glaring off the glass of a watercolour. There were few emails to respond to and within the hour Malachy felt justified in inserting the flashdrive and clicking on the folder called ‘novel’, selecting from within it the file called ‘novel10.doc’.
‘Tenth draft in only fifteen years.’
He said it out loud, with contrived loftiness, laughed and took the piss out of himself, receiving the abuse well. All residual effects of the dream had gone, the details were forgotten. Until the next time.
* * *
Jed
None of his girlfriends knew this, but whenever Jed had sex in the morning, he always had Ian Dury playing in his head. He’d grown used to the soundtrack. It wasn’t a distraction and it didn’t irritate him; it was a brilliant song after all – as sexy in its funk as it was funny in its lyrics. It had started with Celine. She had been French, intense and passionate, and when she’d purred in his ear in the middle of his sleep, wake up and make love with me, that’s what kicked it all off.
Jed knew his current relationship was on the way out; from fizz to fizzle in eight months. It had been as awkward as it had been depressing last night, to be the only non-conversing table in a packed and buzzing restaurant. They checked their phones, ate, gazed around the room, checked their phones again, eavesdropped on other people’s conversations and barely looked at each other. Fiona went to bed when they arrived back at his flat. I’m tired, she’d said, as if it was Jed’s fault. He’d sat up late, finishing off the red wine he’d opened the night before, even though he’d forgotten to put a stopper in it and it really didn’t taste very good. Jed had thought, I’m too young to be one of those couples that go out for dinner and don’t speak. And then he thought, I’m too old to be frittering away time on a relationship like this. I have a headache, he thought, collapsing into bed and drifting to sleep before he could remember to kiss her goodnight let alone check she was even there.
But he woke, horny. It was natural, chemical. Ian Dury was goading him to have a proper wriggle in the naughty, naked nude. He sidled up to Fiona, his cock finding the soft dale between her buttock cheeks to nestle in. Unlike Ian Dury, however, it wasn’t lovemaking he wanted. Just a fuck. She moved a little, her breathing quickening as he ran his hand along her thigh, up her body, a squeeze of her breast before venturing downwards and between her legs. She was warm and moist and she let him manoeuvre her so that he could work his way into her from behind. No kissing. She had a thing – paranoia – about morning breath, which initially he’d found charming, then irritating but today just useful, as he didn’t want kissing and eye contact. He just wanted to come because soon enough she’d be gone.
She dumped Jed in a stutteringly over-verbose phone call that lunch-time. It’s not you, it’s me. I just need some space. Let’s just be friends. It’s fine, he kept saying, I’m fine with it. I agree. If something of such little substance was finally over, it really didn’t warrant this level of analysis or justifying. Don’t worry, he told her, don’t worry. I feel the same.
‘You feel the same?’ She sounded affronted, as if her self-esteem was dependent on him being crushed.
Jed sensed this. ‘I mean,’ he qualified, ‘if you’re sure. Take all the time you need.’
‘I’m sure,’ she said.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘OK.’ And for her benefit, he dropped his voice a tone or two. ‘Take care,’ he said.
‘You too,’ she said. ‘Friends?’
‘Friends.’
He had too many of these ‘friends’ with whom he had mercifully minimal contact. None had truly made the transition from girlfriend to friend. None had even re-formed into useful booty calls. Ultimately, none meant that much to him because none was the one who got away. He hadn’t seen her for such a long time, not since she moved to America a decade and a half ago.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_0dac5817-96f6-53e9-a630-08c9b632842a)
Nine o’clock. Oriana felt pleased with herself. Apart from a vaguely recalled period of wakefulness in the small hours and despite the nap that her mother had tricked her into taking the previous afternoon, she’d slept through the clash of time zones and she’d slept well enough for it to feel truly like morning. There was no need to count the hours backwards and figure out what the real time was. She accepted that nine in the morning, GMT, was now the true time in her life. She looked at the dressing gown her mother had laid out for her. It was white towelling and had the crest of a hotel embroidered in navy on the breast pocket. My mum has become one of those people who actually buy the hotel robe. She didn’t know whether she should laugh or cringe at this. She did know she’d rather get dressed than put the thing on. This wasn’t her home and it wasn’t a hotel and she wasn’t comfortable mooching about in borrowed towelling robes. She opened the bedroom door and listened hard. The house appeared to be empty but still Oriana padded quietly, self-consciously, along the corridor to the bathroom. She thought, this is the type of carpet I fantasized about as a child. The colour of butterscotch and as softly dense and bouncy as a Walt Disney lamb. And the bathroom itself; warm, bright and spotless, with hotel toiletries placed neatly on the sink and the bath – additional prerequisites of her childhood dreams. And yet she could not remember her mother ever yearning for such things.
Showered and dressed with her hair in a towel turban, Oriana made her way downstairs. Stairs that don’t creak or groan, she mused, make one feel light and dainty. When she was young, her father had called her Fairy Elephant – such was the inadvertent noise she’d make even crossing the hallway of her childhood home. It was only when she was at the base of the stairs that she realized she wasn’t alone in the house. From behind the glazed door leading into the kitchen, she could hear the radio tuned low to something middle of the road. It must be Bernard. Had it been her mother, the volume would have been high on a talk show and Rachel would be joining in, or, as Bernard would have described it, having her tuppence worth.
‘Morning.’
Bernard looked up from the crossword and a mug of tea. He smiled his uncomplicated smile. ‘Good morning, love,’ he said. ‘Breakfast?’
Last night, Oriana had been too tired not to feel sick after a couple of mouthfuls and prior to that, she’d only snacked on the plane.
‘Yes, please.’
‘What would you like?’
She looked blankly around the kitchen. She had no idea, really.
‘Toast and tea?’ Bernard suggested. ‘Poached egg?’ He could hear hunger in her inability to decide. He chuckled. ‘Sit yourself down – have a look at six across.’
She couldn’t concentrate on crossword clues and watched Bernard at the stove. ‘I had a special poaching pan,’ she said, ‘in America.’
Bernard had a spoon, a saucepan of boiling water and a perfected technique.
‘Fancy that,’ he said, his tone genial.
Poached to perfection, Oriana thought, as she tucked in.
‘More toast?’
Oriana nodded because Bernard’s toast was cut into triangles, buttered thickly and placed in a toast rack. The taste was as comforting as it was delicious. English salty butter and builder’s tea. She had to concede that some things just didn’t travel well across the Atlantic.
‘What do you have for breakfast,’ Bernard asked, ‘over there?’
Oriana wondered why he was using the present tense. Being tactful, probably. She’d told them both last night that she was back in the UK for good or for whatever. She shrugged. ‘I used to just grab something,’ she said, ‘from a stall or a bakery, on my way to work.’
Bernard filled her mug with a strong brew the same colour as the brown teapot. He used a tea strainer. The tea strainer had a little holder of its own and the teapot was returned to a trivet on the table. He did like things just so, Bernard. Oriana knew that in itself was what had attracted her mother to this ordinary, gentle man. Her father placed used tea bags on windowsills and tore into loaves of bread with his hands and teeth. Her father once told her that plates were for the bourgeoisie.
‘You take your time,’ Bernard said and she knew he meant way beyond her eating breakfast at his table. ‘Your mother’ll not be long.’ And he returned to his crossword, instinctively knowing when to pour more tea, when to glance and smile. Privately, they both reflected that they liked this time, just the two of them. They’d rarely had it. They barely knew each other. Rachel, who could have been the conduit, had kept them separate.
After breakfast – and Bernard had insisted she went nowhere near the washing-up (plenty of time for that, love) – he sent Oriana out for a walk, explaining painstakingly the route around the block. His pedantry with directions had infuriated her when she’d been a teen. Boring old fart. Mum – he’s such an old woman! Now, though, she liked it. It was one less thing to think about – which way to go – because in recent months which direction to take had consumed her entirely. Today was a day just for putting one foot in front of the other, for allowing the sidewalk to turn back into a pavement, for acknowledging that driving on the left was actually right, for accepting that cars were tiny and the traffic lights and postboxes were different, more polite somehow, and that this was Derbyshire, not San Francisco, and that was the end of that.
* * *
‘Where is she?’
‘She’s out for a walk – just round the block. The Bigger Block. I told her the way.’
‘But round the block doesn’t take an hour, Bernard, not even the Bigger One, not even when your knee’s playing up.’
‘She’ll be fine.’
‘Something’s happened to her.’
‘Here? In Hathersage?’
‘Not here in Hathersage, Bernard. Out there – over there.’ Rachel gesticulated wildly as if America, her own homeland, was an annoying fly just to the left of her. ‘Something happened,’ she said. ‘That’s why she came back. That’s why she looks the way she does.’
‘Well,’ said Bernard, ‘she had a good breakfast. You can’t go far wrong on a full stomach.’
Rachel rolled her eyes and left the house.
The cacophony of tooting and the screeching of tyres tore into Oriana’s peaceful stroll.
‘Get in, honey!’ Her mother was trying to open the passenger door while leaning across the gearstick, buckled as she was by her safety belt and hampered by her capacious bag on the passenger seat. Rachel now had the door open and was lying on her handbag.
‘Oriana – get in.’
For a split second, Oriana actually thought about sitting on top of her – if the urgency in her mother’s voice was anything to go by. But Rachel had managed to straighten herself and hoick the bag into the back by the time Oriana sat herself down.
Her mother was agitated. ‘You can’t take an hour to walk around the block!’
‘Can’t I?’
‘No!’
‘No?’
‘No! Not without telling someone you’re going for a long walk.’
She’s serious, Oriana thought. She’s utterly serious. All those years when she didn’t know where I was and didn’t care what time I was back.
It was so preposterous. Surely her mother could see that? However, the irony appeared not to have confronted Rachel. But there again, Rachel had reinvented herself and parcelled away the past when she’d left Robin for Bernard. The car radio was on and Rachel bantered back vitriolically at the callers and the presenters, having her tuppence worth, all the way home.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_853ef1ad-dcbe-553c-af95-8d1d1df5da3a)
‘I thought I’d come this weekend.’
‘Good morning, brother dear. Alone?’
‘Yes,’ Jed told Malachy. ‘Alone.’
‘You’re on your own, then? Again?’ Malachy looked at the phone as if Jed could see his expression which was playfully arch.
‘Yes,’ Jed laughed at himself. ‘Again.’
‘Which one was it?’
‘Fiona – the lawyer.’
‘Did I meet Fiona the lawyer?’
‘No,’ Jed said. ‘We were only together about eight months.’
‘Jesus – have I not seen you for eight months?’
‘Piss off – of course you have. I just didn’t bring Fiona to the house, that’s all.’
Malachy considered this. But there was no pattern to which girlfriends Jed brought home. Sometimes it was girls he wanted to impress, other times it was girls he wanted to unnerve, as if their reaction to the house was the ultimate litmus test.
‘Fine,’ said Malachy. ‘It’ll be good to see you.’
Mildly frustrated with Jed for making him late setting off for work, Malachy cursed his brother under his breath. Not that he was expecting any clients. But still. He had standards and opening times and a novel to write and a business to run. And, now, his younger brother descending on him for the weekend. Which would mean long nights and bottles of wine and philosophizing and reminiscing and arguing and irritation and laughter. Malachy jumped into his car, noting that the de la Mares had long since left on the school run.
* * *
Oriana looked at her phone, deflated. The number she’d rung was unobtainable – the fact that it still had a name ascribed to it made this seem all the more blunt. How could she not have known that Cat had changed her number? Oriana tried the number again and then chucked the phone on the sofa in frustration before slumping down and reaching for it again as if giving the gadget a third and final chance.
Rachel pretended not to notice. ‘Do you want to use the proper phone?’ she asked, referring to the landline. She and Bernard shared one mobile ‘for emergencies’ and it rarely left the drawer of the desk in the hallway. If it was mobile, how could it be grounded and trustworthy?
‘I was just trying Cat,’ Oriana said, ‘but I think she’s changed her number.’
‘And she didn’t give you her new one?’ Rachel employed extravagant indignance on her daughter’s behalf but it backfired.
‘If she’d given me her new number, I wouldn’t be phoning her old one.’
Bernard looked up, aggrieved, and immediately Oriana regretted her snappiness.
‘Sorry.’
She vaguely recalled a mass-text from Cat with a new number a few months ago. She’d been on a stolen weekend with Casey, just outside Monterey, in their favourite fish restaurant, the sides open to the sea, a breeze from the surf bringing an ephemeral saltiness to the food. She remembered being so in the moment, so desperate for no interruption, for time to slow down, for the day to stretch and belong only to them, that when the text came she glanced at it and discarded it.
‘Sorry,’ she said to her mother and, privately, to Cat.
‘I thought she was living in the US too?’
‘She was – Colorado – but she came back about a year ago.’
‘You could phone Django,’ her mother suggested, but they both knew how the phone could ring at Cat’s uncle’s place and he might answer it, if he felt like it, or not, if he didn’t. Usually, he’d rage across the house simply to bury the phone in the sofa cushions to shut the damn thing up.
‘Seven, four, nine,’ Oriana chanted, ‘six, eight, two.’ Django McCabe’s phone number was one of the few still inscribed into her memory. She’d known it from a time long before SIM cards made memorizing numbers outdated and pointless.
‘He’s poorly, you know,’ Rachel said, ‘from what I’ve heard.’
Oriana thought, I could always drive over there – I loved Django. But she didn’t want to. When one had lived away from one’s roots for so long, returning always revealed such an unexpected acceleration in the ageing of those left behind. Her mother. Bernard. They always looked so much older than she anticipated. And Django – whom Oriana remembered so vividly and fondly as robust and larger than life – she simply didn’t want to see him shriven and ill and aged.
Facebook. In recent weeks, she’d stayed sensibly away from Facebook much as she’d avoided Alice Trenton in the school playground – the cool girl, the mean girl; get too close and you’re trapped. Facebook was similar, thrilling and oppressive in equal measure. The choice was between Django and Facebook. The former brought with it intimacy, the latter intrusion, and Oriana wanted to steer clear of both. There again, Facebook afforded her invisibility. She reached for her iPad which, at her behest, Bernard had gingerly had a play on the night before, his index finger out rigid while his remaining fingers and thumb were scrunched into a fist, as if merely pointing at the screen might deliver an electric shock.
Facebook. She signed in. Sixteen trillion notifications and a newsfeed jammed with peculiar app suggestions and people she hardly knew gloating about virtual farms and aquariums and poker games; photos of babies and smiling and beaches and the wild and wacky times that apparently defined everyone else’s lives. She typed in ‘Ca’. And sure enough, up came ‘Cat McCabe’ but, just above her, ‘Casey’ too. He was minute, his photo hardly recognizable at this size. Do not click on ‘Casey’. There is no need and there is no point.
With the iPad on her lap, Oriana pushed her hands under her thighs and stared and stared at the screen until the wave of nausea passed and she felt her breathing regulate. She should have unfriended him. She was aware that, if she did so now, he probably wouldn’t even notice. She clicked on Cat and sent a message.
I’m back in Derbyshire – call me! I can’t find your new number xxxx
A little white lie on Facebook was so pale it practically didn’t exist.
Bernard announced he was off out for a stroll. It was only when Rachel cleared her throat for the second time that Oriana realized there was something brewing.
‘Cup of tea, Mum?’ Clever.
‘No. Not now.’ It wasn’t tea brewing. Rachel appeared awkward and spoke fast. ‘I was saying to Bernard last night how lovely it is to have you home. And we both want you to know you can stay as long as you like and take all the time you need – you know, to find a job and your feet and somewhere to live and what it is that you want to do.’
‘Thank you.’ It suddenly seemed prudent to sound genuine, guileless. But from Rachel’s penetrating stare, Oriana knew she saw right through it.
Oriana felt irked. Four days in the last five years, a similar average over the past eighteen years, and already she’s had enough of me. ‘What you mean is, it’s been nice seeing me but you think I should get a job, ship out and get on with it.’
Rachel tutted. ‘Honestly – why must you be so defensive?’
Oriana thought, I’ve got to get out of here. Then she thought, but I have nowhere else to go. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said and it wasn’t to apologize, it was to qualify. ‘It’s just it sounded like you don’t want me here.’
‘It’s not that,’ her mother said, ‘but I really don’t know what you’re even doing here.’
For years, Oriana had felt better about her relationship with her mother by believing, quite categorically, that her mother had been in the wrong. Now it was obvious that in this current situation, Rachel was actually quite right. ‘Why have you come back?’ she asked. ‘Why give up a charmed life? What happened to Casey – I’m assuming you guys are through?’
Oriana sighed and shrugged as if it was no big deal and just a tiresome topic. ‘It was time for a change,’ she shrugged. ‘It was hard for a while – but I’ve moved on. And I don’t really want to talk about it.’
‘And you’re OK?’
‘It was my call. I’m fine.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Look at me!’
‘You’re thin.’
‘Thin’s good! I’m fit.’
‘You’re too thin – for you.’
‘Nonsense. I eat like a horse – you’ve watched me! Two poached eggs and toast for breakfast. Seconds at supper. Bernard’s “nice biscuit” at regular intervals throughout the day.’
‘You look like you’ve been in the wars,’ Rachel said in Bernard’s voice. Her transatlantic accent might have been tempered by four decades of Derbyshire, but some phrases would simply never suit her.
‘Mother, I’m fine,’ Oriana said. ‘Casey is fine too. We’re still great friends – but I had to come back. You know – work, tax, stuff. And I’m thirty-four.’
‘Time waits for no man.’ Rachel channelled Bernard again. She felt irritated. Her daughter had just said emphatically, convincingly, that she was fine. The thinness, the paleness – perhaps that was just how Oriana in her thirties was meant to look. ‘Now you’re back – for good – will you go see Robin?’
The name hung like a dead man on the gallows, and silent, loaded looks swung back and forth between mother and daughter.
‘Now you’re back – you ought to.’
‘Why would he even know that I’m back?’
‘He doesn’t. He wouldn’t.’ Rachel paused. ‘But this isn’t a holiday, a flying visit. You have a duty.’
Oriana had to take a moment. A knot of accusations and retorts were loaded onto the tip of her tongue and aimed dangerously at Rachel. She bit it.
‘You don’t keep in touch? At all?’ Rachel said.
‘You know I don’t. You know that.’
‘I just thought—’
‘Well, don’t.’
‘You’re a lot older now, Oriana – and he’s not getting any younger.’
‘What’s that meant to mean?’
‘It means—’
‘Have you seen him?’ Oriana made the notion sound just as preposterous.
‘No – but that’s different.’
‘How so?’
‘He’s your father – for all his faults, he is still your father.’
How long? When was the last time? Oriana rifled through fading memories, their chronology confused, as if sifting through a disintegrating pile of documents.
‘Louis Bayford’s funeral,’ Oriana said.
Her mother paused. ‘That was the last time I saw him, myself. But you didn’t stay. You left straight after the service. You disappeared. He never knew you were there.’
Nor did Malachy or Jed. Oriana plucked at the seam on a scatter cushion. That funeral. Five years ago? Six? She had sat at the back of the church, away from everyone, hiding down into her coat, fighting the urge to stare at the backs of their heads, Jed and Malachy; praying neither would turn and see her. She couldn’t even remember seeing her father there.
She’d left as soon as she could – to avoid him not so much as them.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_92f914c3-bbec-5963-b315-c0266ce1da5d)
The doorbell had never worked and the knocker had fallen off many years ago. There had been a cowbell once – but that was now by the hearth because Django McCabe found it the perfect surface off which to strike Swan Vestas when lighting the fire. A bitterly cold March day meant knocking on the old wooden door was not an option – even in balmy weather, bare knuckles on dense wood was a painful thing and, because of the door’s thickness, pointless anyway. So Oriana did what everyone did, what she’d always done – she opened the perennially unlocked door, stepped inside and called out knock! knock!
It was Cat’s suggestion to meet here, at the old house. She told Oriana that Django was ill though you wouldn’t know it. That it would do him good to have a guest, that he’d cook up a storm in her honour. Their phone call had been brief, excited, fond. The arrangement had been made for today, Thursday, a week to the day of Oriana’s return.
‘Knock knock?’
Django appeared, resplendent in Peruvian cardigan and citrus yellow corduroys. His hair was the colour of gunmetal and platinum and his beard was in a goatee, styled to a rakish point. On his feet, the clogs Oriana remembered so well. She had the strangest urge to run to him, to hold on tight, as if she’d just imbibed a Lewis Carroll potion that had hurled her back to childhood. From the kitchen came drifts of Classic FM, something manipulatively rousing like Elgar or Vaughan Williams. Also, wafts of an olfactory clash of ingredients. Everything about Django McCabe, about his household, was centred on the happy collision of seemingly disparate elements. It was a thoughtful serendipity. It was unbelievably genuine. In America, when holding court amongst her friends and telling them of her crazy technicolour upbringing, Oriana had shamelessly appropriated many of the details from here and transposed them to her home at Windward.
‘Oriana Taylor,’ he marvelled, taking her hand with great reverence. ‘Oriana Taylor. Well, heavens to Betsy.’
‘Hey, Django,’ she said and she felt as if she was ten, or seven, or fourteen. The slab stone floor underfoot, the peculiar and lively smells from the kitchen, the creak of the house, and the balding kilim in the middle of the floor. It was familiar and a comfort because while her life had gone on regardless, all this had remained just as it should be.
And then Cat appeared with a beaming smile and arms outstretched. ‘Oh my God, Oriana!’
‘Oh my God, Cat – you’re pregnant!’
There’d been no need for apologies or excuses or even explanations for the silent months. Their friendship had never lapsed, it had simply loitered where they’d left it whilst time had flung forward.
‘So,’ said Oriana, ‘it can be done.’
They were curled at opposite ends of the sagging Chesterfield sofa.
‘Yes,’ said Cat, ‘you have sex at the right time and bam! baby on board.’
‘I meant the move back to the UK?’ And, just momentarily, the gleam left Oriana’s eyes.
‘Are you not back for good, then?’
‘For better, for worse,’ Oriana shrugged.
‘It’s amazing how fast you’ll settle back into the groove. And Casey?’
Being evasive with her mother was one thing. With Cat, it was unthinkable.
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No more Casey. But it’s all fine – bless him.’ She was rattling off the words like a mantra. ‘Moving back here is the best thing I could do for him too. I mean, I know the United States is huge – but there’s space and then there’s distance. Sometimes, you need more than merely miles to move on. Sometimes you need time zones.’
‘And you’re OK?’ Cat pressed, because Oriana’s voice had been expressionless. ‘Really OK?’
‘I am dandy.’ But still Cat was regarding her. ‘We’d come to the end. It was my call.’
‘When?’
‘A while back,’ said Oriana. ‘Well, three, four months.’
‘Poor Casey though, having left his—’
‘I need a glass of water, a cup of tea.’ Oriana had both in front of her but her mouth was suddenly dry. If Cat could just leave the topic while she went to fetch a drink. ‘Want anything?’
‘More space!’ The baby was wedged under her ribs. ‘How’s your ma?’
‘Suburban,’ Oriana said, returning. ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’
Cat shook her head. ‘I haven’t seen her for years. No one has. I still find it bizarre – how she traded one life for another so diametrically opposed. How is Boring Bernard?’
Oriana flinched at the moniker they’d given him as teenagers. ‘Do you know, he’s just – normal.’
Cat thought about it. ‘I suppose we confused normal with boring.’
‘That’s because both of you grew up not really knowing any normal people,’ said Django, suddenly appearing with a wooden spoon that appeared to be covered in sweet-smelling tar. ‘Which was a blessing and a curse. For my part, I apologize. Come on, lunch.’
The kitchen. How she’d always loved the McCabes’ kitchen. Despite the size of her own childhood home, Oriana’s family kitchen had been pokey. And it had been underused. As unconventional as the McCabes’ household had been – three young girls living with their eccentric uncle – it had always felt fundamentally stable to Oriana. And Django – as bonkers and outspoken as he was, he always put food on the table. The ingredients were peculiar, but mealtimes were sacred; they sat down as a family to eat. Throughout her life, she’d often arrived there hungry and wanting. And she’d always left nourished.
‘Is that cannabis?’ said Oriana.
‘No – but I used quite a lot of oregano. And a splash of Henderson’s Relish.’
‘Not in the dish,’ said Oriana, ‘there. On your windowsill.’
They all regarded the plants. Cat rolled her eyes.
‘Medicinal,’ Django defended himself. ‘Your husband’s the doctor, Catriona – he’s done research.’
‘You could get busted!’ Oriana said.
‘I am busted,’ said Django. ‘I have cancer. Prostrate.’
‘Prostate,’ said Cat quietly.
‘It’s very slow growing,’ said Django rather proudly. He tapped at the bowls in front of them. ‘Now look – eat up. I’ve been experimenting. If Tabasco is hot enough to blow your socks off, just imagine what it can do to cancer cells. They thought I was a goner. I’ve proved them wrong.’
This was a home where discordance was joyful, where love and hope provided the bedrock for whatever was dumped on top. Oriana felt more settled than at any other time since her return.
‘And will you be visiting Robin now you’re back?’
‘Unlikely,’ Oriana said.
‘So why did you return?’ Django pushed.
‘Sorry,’ Cat said to Oriana, under her breath. But it was fine.
‘It was time.’ She shrugged, paused, continued quietly. ‘Some things came to an end. Job. Lease. Other stuff.’
Django liked her ambivalence. He wasn’t very good at ambivalence and he admired it in others.
‘Can’t be easy, living where you’re living.’
Oriana shrugged. ‘It isn’t.’
‘Seconds,’ said Django and it wasn’t a question. He gathered the bowls and took them back into the kitchen to refill. Cat excused herself and disappeared upstairs.
Alone at the table, Oriana thought about her mother. She didn’t doubt that the woman cared about her, in her own way which could be detached and could be dramatic and was always self-centred. But she knew and her mother knew that the Hathersage house was no place for her.
‘Here.’ Cat returned with the local paper. ‘Just look at this.’
An apartment at Windward was up for sale.
‘That’s the last place on earth I’d live,’ said Oriana.
‘You couldn’t afford it anyway – they go for a fortune, these days.’
They peered at the pictures which, though in colour, were grainy. The main one was of the house – obviously taken during the summer months. There were four smaller photographs of interiors. Oriana considered them for some time.
‘I’m not even sure which one this is,’ Oriana said. ‘No one had a hi-tech kitchen like that when I was there.’
‘It’s Louis’, isn’t it?’ said Django, back.
‘Is it?’ said Oriana, grieving for Louis anew.
‘Look.’ He jabbed a finger at the final photo. ‘Where’s that then?’
The girls looked.
‘The oriel windows,’ Oriana said, ‘right at the top. But it can’t be Louis’.’
They read the details.
‘How on earth did they make three bedrooms out of his apartment?’ Oriana read on. ‘Two bathrooms, one en suite?’ She looked up at Cat and Django. ‘I loved it when it was Louis’. It was my place of choice for tea. It was always so genteel.’
Django laughed. ‘Fabulous old queen.’
Oriana turned to Cat. ‘Do you remember – after school – going for toast and to do homework at his kitchen table because it was so much quieter than downstairs?’
Cat looked at the details anew. ‘I can’t believe that this is Louis’ place. And yes, of course I remember.’
‘I practically lived there during exams,’ Oriana said.
‘Well – between Louis’ and ours,’ said Cat.
‘Two bathrooms and three bedrooms,’ Oriana marvelled again.
‘Crivens,’ Django murmured at the guide price.
‘Will you visit?’ Cat asked.
Oriana looked at her with exasperation.
‘I meant Windward,’ Cat said cautiously. She thought about it. It hadn’t been so long ago that she and Django had been estranged. However temporary it had been, it was hideous at the time. Oriana looked tired. Behind the smile and the teeth-whitening and Bobbi Brown cosmetics, it took an old friend little time to detect a degree of emotional exhaustion.
‘What’s the point? I haven’t spoken to my father in years. I rarely heard from him before that anyway. And I don’t know anyone there any more.’
It was only after Oriana had left, when Cat and Django were reviewing her visit, that they realized none of them had mentioned the boys. Not once. Not even when poring over the details of the apartment that had come up at Windward. The Bedwell brothers. Malachy and Jed. And Cat wondered whether they, like Robin, were dead to Oriana too.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_ae313555-0d14-593e-9e0e-b3a005f562b0)
The front door was never locked but Jed was always acutely aware how nowadays, Malachy’s was one of only three dwellings whose front door remained resolutely unlocked. Nearly all the other apartments in the old house had new security systems and even burglar alarms. Still, along the Corridor – running subterraneous through the house like a hollow crooked spine – the internal doors joining it were unlocked. That had been the very point, back at the end of the 1960s, when the pioneering group of artists and writers and musicians had rented Windward. There was to be flow, Windward ho – ideas and creativity, triumphs and failures, music and colour, characters invented and real – into and out of the rooms, through the windows, across the seasons, during the days and nights. Now, with only two of the original seven artists still living there, Windward was a quieter place. Apartments were much changed. White-collar people lived there now, quietly, privately. Music, if it could be heard at all, came in faint, civilized drifts from radios and sound systems, not resident musicians. Colour these days was polite Farrow & Ball, rollered to a perfect chalky finish; not Winsor & Newton oils squeezed direct from the tube and daubed in a glistening cacophony of hues. There was a distinction between day and night now, between your place and mine. These days, residents wouldn’t dream of entering without knocking.
Nowadays, Windward was sedate, like a peaceable old uncle whose youthful tattoos were hidden from view. Cars were either German coupes or four-wheel drives and were parked neatly, herringbone style. Not Jed’s, though. He parked as he’d been taught, when learning to drive at Windward – askew on the gravel like a skate on a turn. Malachy knew this wasn’t in defiance of the residents’ association standards, it was because Windward was still home to Jed. He couldn’t distinguish between the Windward of his youth and the place today. And he didn’t understand the importance of compliance, because there’d never been rules back then and there’d been harmony. Whenever Jed arrived, his car was flung as if he simply couldn’t bear to be in it a moment longer. Into his childhood home he’d barge, rolling into his older brother’s life, shedding bags, heading for the purple velvet sofa. Into it he’d collapse and sigh as if Bear Grylls himself would have been hard pressed to make light of such a journey home as Jed’s. Really, it should have irritated Malachy, but instead it always slightly amused him. Jed’s return to Windward was akin to that of an adventurer walking through the front door, having spent years exploring the wilds of somewhere far-flung and dangerous. Namely, Sheffield, forty minutes’ drive away.
‘Hey!’ said Jed.
Malachy was finishing off a paragraph on his laptop. Jed waited until his brother closed the lid on his work.
‘The novel?’
Malachy shrugged. He stretched and smiled. ‘Beer?’
‘Music to my ears,’ said Jed. He was now sitting with his arms outstretched as if he had beautiful girls nestling to either side. ‘I’ll get it,’ he said, energized by the thought, springing up from the sofa. He went to the kitchen and took two bottles of beer from the fridge. He noted that apart from beer, there was butter, unopened cheese and a lot of Greek yoghurt in the fridge. And not much else. He looked around. Blackening bananas. Washing-up. The cap was off the Henderson’s Relish.
‘What’s up with the cleaner?’
Malachy took the beer and had a sip. ‘I don’t have a cleaner any more.’
‘I can see,’ said Jed. ‘But why not?’ It was one luxury Jed would cut corners elsewhere in his life rather than relinquish.
Malachy shrugged.
‘What can your girlfriend think?’ Jed said, now noticing a general dustiness.
Malachy shrugged again. ‘I don’t have a girlfriend any more.’ He paused. ‘My girlfriend was my cleaner.’
Jed feared his beer might come out his nose. ‘You were shagging the cleaner?’
‘No,’ Malachy protested. ‘Well – yes. But don’t say it like that – it cheapens it. And she wasn’t “the cleaner” – she was Csilla.’
‘Was she a girlfriend who tidied up – or a cleaner who became a girlfriend?’
‘The latter,’ said Malachy.
Jed started chuckling. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just my cleaner is called Betty and she’s a hundred and forty and has whiskers.’
‘Csilla was twenty-four,’ said Malachy. ‘Hungarian, with a physics degree and a Lara Croft figure.’
‘Fuck,’ Jed murmured, impressed. ‘You’ve certainly shafted yourself – your house is a mess and your unmade bed’s empty.’ He was starting to notice that Malachy was shrugging a lot, not in an acquiescent way, but with apathy. ‘What happened then? Did she no longer tickle your fancy with her feather duster?’
Malachy watched his brother laughing. He’d humour him, he decided, as he went back to the kitchen to fetch another beer. ‘She stole from me,’ he called through.
From the silence which ensued, he knew he’d wiped the smile off Jed’s face. He sauntered back, whistling; gave his brother another bottle and then sat himself down in their father’s Eames lounger and put his feet up on the footstool.
‘Fuck,’ said Jed. This was awful. ‘What did she take?’
‘Nothing in the end – because I intercepted it. I knew something wasn’t quite right but I couldn’t work out what. So I left for the gallery with a kiss on the cheek – then returned an hour later hoping to catch her so we could talk. Actually, that’s a lie. I returned hoping to catch her at it – at something – red-handed. Like in a bad film.’ He paused. ‘I laughed at the thought of finding her with some young buck, in flagrante, to justify my hunch. Instead, I found her and some sleazy-looking bastard loading up stuff into packing boxes. Our stuff – Dad’s.’
‘Fuck.’
Malachy looked at him. ‘You’re a bit impoverished when it comes to expletives, buddy.’
‘Shit. Wish I’d known.’ Jed thought, Malachy’s going to shrug now. And Malachy did. ‘A thought – did you continue paying her once she was your girlfriend?’
‘Caveat emptor?’ said Malachy.
‘It’s just – out of the two of us – when it comes to girlfriends you’re always so much more –’ Jed struggled for the right word. ‘Discerning.’ He wanted to say cynical.
‘I reckon it was a long-held game plan of hers,’ Malachy said, as if it was just one of those things.
‘Wouldn’t anyone have seen? Seen Lara Croft trying to make off with your things?’
‘You forget, Jed – it’s not like it was. People live here but they don’t work from here. During the day, there’s rarely anyone around. Paula’s in and out – but she’s not in the main building. And the two who are still here – they’re old.’
Jed thought for a moment. Even now, whenever he returned to Windward, he still liked to think it was all caught in a time warp, that everyone would be here, that everything would be just so. That he’d arrive and all would be preserved and someone would be playing bongos and an electric guitar would be searing from upstairs and people would be painting or being painted and everyone would be the same. No one would have left. They’d all be there, for him. As they had been. Jed blinked back to the present. This was Windward now. His parents had lived in Denmark for many years and rarely came over. There was only him and his brother and this faded, dusty place that needed a bloody good scrub.
‘So – you’ll be on the lookout for a new cleaner then,’ said Jed. ‘I should imagine.’ He wanted to perk up. He wanted to lighten the load. He didn’t want to appear rude. Poor bloody Malachy.
‘Yes,’ said Malachy, ‘I reckon I am.’
‘And a new girlfriend,’ said Jed.
‘From now on I’ll have either one or the other but not both at the same time and certainly not the same for both.’ Malachy thought about it. About Csilla. ‘To be honest, a cleaner enhances my life more, anyway. I need one more than I need a girlfriend.’
‘It’s not about need,’ Jed said quietly. And Malachy remembered how much he liked it when his brother went quiet and wise and thoughtful and astute. It was as though he leapfrogged Malachy and became the older sibling, despite being almost three years younger.
‘By the way,’ said Malachy, though it led on from nothing, ‘I’m not having the operation.’
Jed squinted down his beer bottle, as if trying to read meaning into the last slick of foamy liquid the way a fortune teller might with tea leaves. ‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes,’ said Malachy.
‘Is that wise?’
‘It’s not unwise,’ Malachy said. ‘It’s not life and death. It’s something else I don’t need. I said no more operations and I meant it. I’m too old to be vain.’
Jed thought quickly about his brother’s fixation with only wanting the things he needed. He no longer saw it – that which made strangers flinch when they saw Malachy; children stare and point. That which made some people approach and question Malachy quite brazenly; curiosity outweighing manners and decorum, voyeuristic fear putting paid to tact and basic sensitivity. And then Jed thought, despite everything, my brother is still the better-looking one, the bastard.
‘Do you want to come in to the gallery with me tomorrow?’ Malachy asked, rummaging for the Indian takeaway menu. He deftly folded it into a paper aeroplane and sent it across to Jed, where it nosedived and landed just at his feet.
Jed perused the menu though neither he nor Malachy ever veered from their choices. They both still gave the menu much attention, as if it was rude, disrespectful, not to at least say pasanda and okra and fjal out loud.
‘The usual.’ Jed launched it back at Malachy where it curved off and glided some way before crashing in to the piano.
‘So,’ said Malachy. ‘Are you coming to the gallery tomorrow?
‘Er – no,’ said Jed as if he’d considered it. ‘It’s been a busy shitefest week.’
‘Some of us also have to work weekends, you know.’
‘Some of us have our brother’s flats to tidy up and clean,’ Jed countered, nodding at the fallen menu as if it was a case in point.
‘You don’t need to do that,’ said Malachy.
And Jed said, ‘I keep trying to tell you – there’s a meaningful distinction between need and want. I want to do it.’
His younger brother was mothering him. It should have irritated Malachy. Somehow, it didn’t.
‘I might pop in,’ Jed said, because around him, he could see what was needed and he could tell that it was what his brother wanted.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_2e9aa3f3-adfc-51c5-aa10-49cff8fa1737)
At first it had been the emails, perforating Oriana’s return to Derbyshire and compromising the watertightness of her claim to be content to leave and happy to be back. Skype she could blank, having disabled it on her iPad. But FaceTime – she could no more ignore that than she could answering the door when she knew the caller had already seen her inside. It was almost worth switching allegiance from apples to blackberries. Oh for the days of the brick, she thought, glancing at her mother and Bernard’s hefty shared mobile phone whilst looking at her iPhone with a mixture of loathing and anxiety as it attempted to beam Ashlyn into her mother’s front room.
Over the sea and far away. Whatever the weather. Wherever you may be. Across time. At any time. A superfast highway. It’s a small world and you can’t hide. Good morning! It’s afternoon. It’s raining and cold. It’s warm and breezy. We miss you. I don’t want to know that.
Oriana had even deleted the photos which defined the contacts in her phone. If it just read ‘Ashlyn’,surely the request could be ignored, rejected more easily than if Ashlyn’s face, smiling and genial, accompanied such an invitation.
Ashlyn would like to FaceTime. Decline. Answer.
‘Oriana,’ said her mother, ‘aren’t you going to answer that?’ She said so in her ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ tone of voice that implied her socially deprived daughter ought really to invite any interaction into her life, even if only virtual.
‘Too late,’ said Oriana. But she was too late to switch her phone to silent before Ashlyn was trying again. Her mother raised her eyebrow. Bernard had two clues left in the crossword which were stumping him and the sound of the blimmin’ phone was a distraction. Not that he’d say so.
‘Oriana,’ said her mother; it wasn’t a question this time and Oriana felt herself diminish into her teenage self again. God – I’ve got to get out of here. Move. Leave.
Finally, she accepted Ashlyn’s call. She left the sitting room and went to her bedroom, the phone attempting to connect. She knew that Bernard would love to see it do so, to marvel at the technology, at this friend of Oriana’s who could bring San Francisco into his front room in Hathersage. But Oriana didn’t want them to meet, she didn’t want the crossover, she needed separation and privacy. She sat on her bed and Ashlyn, frozen in a particularly unflattering moment, gurned her way into the room fresh from breakfast in San Francisco. She had a different hairstyle. In the three weeks since Oriana had last seen her, Ashlyn had become chestnut brown, not blonde, and mid-length flicky, not long and straight.
‘You look amazing,’ said Oriana, holding her handset so that she wasn’t entirely in shot.
‘Excuse me?’
‘You look amazing!’ she repeated.
‘I look amazing?’ Ashlyn peered close to her phone as if trying to hear better. ‘Is that what you said?’
‘Yes,’ said Oriana. And only then did she realize how quietly she was talking. She felt uneasy talking any louder. She wasn’t in the comfort of her own home, nor the neutrality of a hotel; she was in her mother and Bernard’s house. This was borrowed space compartmentalized by paper-thin walls. She was in their spare room. It suddenly struck her that nowhere on earth did she have her own bedroom any more. She watched Ashlyn, could see the bay in the background, thought of the room over there that had been hers, now the realm of someone else who might have painted over every last vestige of Oriana.
Ashlyn on a sunny Friday morning. Oriana knew exactly what she’d just had from the bakery for breakfast and how it tasted. The aroma of the coffee. The feel of the paper bag. The scrunch and dunk as she tossed it into the trash can. The sensation of the cool spring air ascending from the bay being dissipated by the sun’s warmth. Long sleeves – but sunglasses, too.
She thought back to her own lunch – breakfast now an irrelevant memory. Egg sandwiches made by Bernard, eaten with Bernard and her mum in the kitchen. Celery sticks in a pint glass filled with a little salted water. A bowl of cherry tomatoes. A bottle of salad cream. Soft white bread that stuck to the roof of the mouth. A cup of steaming builder’s tea. And non-stop talk about what’s for tea. Friday night – fish supper. Bernard had been talking about it since elevenses. I like haddock m’self, he’d said. And your mother – she’s for the fishcakes. We both like a buttered bun and these days we share just the one portion of chips. (He’d patted at his heart, to qualify.) But you have what you like, love, whatever you like. Oriana had tried to say that just then with celery fibre caught between her teeth, she couldn’t possibly decide what she might feel like that evening. But that had only encouraged Bernard to list all the fish on offer which, to Oriana, might well have been all the fish in the sea.
‘Cod!’ she’d shouted to shut him up. ‘I’ll have cod and chips, OK?’ She’d ignored her mother staring sharply at her, she’d turned away from Bernard whose expression revealed the brunt of her retort.
‘Don’t feel you need to decide now,’ Bernard had said gently, as if it would be kinder just to pretend Oriana’s snappishness hadn’t happened. ‘Gerry might have a nice piece of hake. Or even plaice. Now that’s a nice fish – and he’ll do that in breadcrumbs, not batter.’
‘Cod.’ Oh my God. ‘Cod’s good.’
‘Well, cod it is then. And will that be a medium or a large? Or you could have the large with a medium chips. Or we could have a large chips between the three of us. And another buttered bun.’
Fuck the chips. Sod the cod. Stuff your stupid buttered bun. I don’t bloody know. I’m halfway through my lunch! Why would anyone want to know what they’re going to be ordering for their tea?
However, Oriana had said nothing. She’d smiled through gritted teeth but the short, sharp exhale had cut through to Bernard like a blast of a cold, ill wind and she’d seen how he’d been taken aback, hurt even, though he’d kept his polite smile up and had rounded off the conversation with a little anecdote about cod being so last year and coley being the new black. And she’d felt appalled that, even at thirty-four, in this house with her mother and Bernard, she was helpless not to revert to a bolshie teen. Life was going backwards. That wasn’t the idea at all.
‘Oriana?’
Ashlyn. Right here, now, in this room. Perhaps she thought the call had frozen; Oriana’s thoughts had rendered her motionless.
‘Hey,’ said Oriana, suddenly remembering to look up or all that Ashlyn would see was her bowed head with roots in need of colour or a good shampoo and condition at the very least.
‘You OK, babe?’
Oriana attempted to peer at her.
‘You sound kind of remote and you look kind of –’
‘Shit?’
‘No,’ Ashlyn laughed and, inopportunely, her face suddenly froze into a grimace. Her voice, though disembodied, came through and hit Oriana squarely. ‘You look kind of – wide-eyed and lonesome.’
Even in the tiny thumbnail of herself in the top of her screen, Oriana couldn’t dispute it. Wide-eyed and lonesome. Like the lyric to a country-and-western standard.
‘I’m still jet-lagged,’ Oriana said feebly, wondering if she’d been freeze-framed like Ashlyn. She hoped so – her friend wouldn’t see through the lie.
Ashlyn was back in motion, slightly jerky, but still herself. She didn’t seem to have heard Oriana. Instead, she’d flipped the viewfinder and was treating Oriana to a panorama of the bay. Oriana flinched.
‘Homesick?’ said Ashlyn.
‘A little.’
‘So, tell me – what you been up to? You working? You been going down memory lane? Caught up with your old buddies? You been back to that old house of yours?’
Oriana thought of Windward; how the place had so quickly become the stuff of legend to her circle in California. She’d used it as a way to win friends and impress. She’d never lied. The tiniest of details were drawn from life, every daub of colour, every line from a song, every name, every event – they were all true. The only dishonesty had been the tone of voice she’d used to narrate these vignettes of her childhood and youth. She had transposed the veracity and complexity of her original emotions into a panoply of perpetual, carefree happiness. Details which might smudge or darken the picture were left out. As far as any of her friends were concerned, Oriana had been blessed by a halcyon upbringing during which she’d been nurtured by a group of artists who were as loving as they were eccentric. She was admired, envied, for having grown up in the quirkiest place in the world: a commune which made the heyday of Haight-Ashbury seem positively suburban. And Woodstock downright dull. Yes, Jimi Hendrix played Woodstock – but he had stayed a month at Windward. Tell us more about Windward, Oriana! Tell us the stories you’ve already told. Again – tell us again. Rod Stewart wrote ‘You’re in My Heart’ there? Seriously? From the top room – the one with the turret? Ronnie Wood forgot to leave? Gillian Ayres painted the walls? Tom Stoppard stayed for a summer, Faye Dunaway for the winter? How cool is that?
‘You been back to Windward?’ Ashlyn was saying with an expansive grin. ‘Has it changed? Who’s still there? Can I FaceTime you when you’re next there? Do it from the iPad – you can give me a virtual tour.’
‘I haven’t been back,’ Oriana told her.
‘You what? Why not?’
‘Not yet,’ said Oriana. ‘But funnily enough I’m going there tomorrow.’
* * *
Tomorrow is now today. Yesterday, after medium cod and chips, and a buttered bun she had only a bite from, Oriana went to bed early and didn’t mention her plans – if she didn’t say them out loud, she could still change them. Even at the last minute she could entitle herself to a turn of heart and no one would be any the wiser. She might feel like seeing Cat instead. Or going to Meadowhall and browsing the shops. Perhaps a day trip to Manchester, to see how it’s changed.
‘May I borrow your car, Mum?’ The tang of malt vinegar on yesterday’s newsprint paper still lingered in the kitchen, counteracting any appetite for breakfast. ‘For the day?’ she qualified. ‘May I borrow your car for the day?’
Rachel scoured her daughter’s face but it was Bernard who read it first and knew instinctively what to say.
‘That’ll be fine, won’t it, Rachel?’ he said, downplaying any need for qualification.
‘Why?’ said her mother. ‘Where are you going?’
Bernard, though, stepped in quickly again. ‘We said we’d take the Vauxhall to Wakefield, didn’t we? We’ll not need Your Car.’
They had the two cars. His was called the Vauxhall. Rachel’s was called Your Car. He looked at Oriana. ‘We’re off to visit the Bennets,’ he said, with a quick complicit smile. He turned to his wife. ‘Oriana can take Your Car.’ He turned back to Oriana. ‘You take your mother’s car, love. You’re on the insurance – you may as well get your premium’s worth.’ He put a lump of sugar into his mug of tea and looked at his wife again. ‘It’s a good idea. It gets her out and about a bit. It’s a lovely day. We don’t want her to feel obliged to join us – on our trip to Wakefield. In the Vauxhall.’ He looked at Oriana. ‘And much as I know the Bennets would love to meet you – well, sitting around listening to us old folk gab – it’s no place for a young woman on the first Saturday in April. A fine one at that.’ He paused. Glanced from Rachel to Oriana while both women stared at him, stunned that he could be at once so subtle yet conniving.
‘You take your mother’s car,’ said Bernard a final time, ‘and have a nice day out.’ And, by the way he finished his tea, tapped both hands down on the table and declaredwell now! the matter was resolved and no further information or discussion was required.
Even in the car, Oriana knew she could change her plans and simply turn up at Cat’s. Or go shopping at Meadowhall. Or reacquaint herself with Bakewell. Belper. Baslow. Eyam. Anywhere. Or just turn round and go nowhere. And yet no one, apart from Ashlyn, knew she was visiting Windward. She could just go there, drive in, drive out. Never step out of the car. No one would be any the wiser. A secret journey. And so she set off, travelling south, retracing the route she’d journeyed three weeks before.
She concentrated on the road, on the sound of the engine, the milometer racking up, the petrol gauge barely moving – dear little car. Would she turn right and go to Blenthrop? Perhaps just park in the car park and sit for a while? She drove on. Or – she could pull in just here, in the lay-by. Stretch her legs and fill her lungs and then decide whether it was really worth carrying on, all the way to Windward. But on she drove.
Eighteen years.
Whereas the sight of Blenthrop had disarmed her three weeks ago, this route back to Windward was as familiar as if she’d made it daily with no interval. As she neared, it seemed everything came into even sharper focus, even the coping stone still lying half hidden in goose grass at the foot of the left gate pillar. She indicated. She turned up the driveway. This was the first time she’d ever done so. She’d left Windward before she learned to drive.
You can’t see the house yet. You have to follow the private road a little way on, she told herself; poker straight until the sudden sweep to the right reveals the house, sitting sedate and solemn and magnetic. Peach-pale stone, seen as so extravagant and modern in 1789, when the Jacobean manor house was demolished and the current Georgian mansion was built. For the first time Oriana noticed the peculiar sight of neatly parked cars either side of the expansive gravelled sweep in front of the house, the vehicles positioned like ribs, like fish bones. And suddenly memories of last night’s cod brought with it a surge of nausea and a clammy coldness swept over her. She placed her forehead on the steering wheel.
What on earth am I doing here? This place makes me feel ill.
A sweep of memories kept at bay for so long: the day she was made to leave, the occasions she’d tried to return. The address bold in her bubbled teenage handwriting on letters she’d never posted. That day, that terrible day when she’d been fifteen.
Oriana wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there but suddenly she was aware of an audience, and she raised her head just enough to see two small girls peering in through the car window. They smiled and waved and she raised her hand half-heartedly. The younger girl pressed her palm against the glass and looked at Oriana earnestly, as if she felt she’d found someone trapped, waiting to be rescued. Reluctantly, she put the window down.
‘Hi,’ said the elder girl. ‘I’m Emma. You can call me Ems.’
‘And I’m Kate,’ said the smaller one. ‘I’m five.’ She splayed out one hand for emphasis.
‘I’m –’ Oriana thought about it. ‘Incognito’ might be prudent but they might not know the word. ‘I’m Binky.’ It was the first name that came into her head. Thank God it was two young girls she was lying to. The name sat perfectly well with them.
‘Are you visiting someone?’
‘Sort of,’ said Oriana, getting out of the car and closing the door thoughtfully. Do people lock their cars now, she wondered. She glanced at the other vehicles. Mercedes. BMW. Range Rover. They probably lock them.
‘We live in the Ice House,’ the little one, Kate, said.
‘The Ice House?’ said Oriana and Kate pointed across the cherry-walk lawn.
The shack is called the Ice House? Someone lives in the shack?
‘We’re sisters,’ said the elder. ‘I’m Emma and I’m eight.’
‘Our mum is called Paula and our dad is called Rob,’ said Kate in a tone of voice which suggested she’d had to repeat this often. But Oriana was only half listening, moving slowly away from the children, ignoring their chatter, gravitating towards the house whether she wanted to or not.
‘Well, bye,’ Emma was saying.
‘See you later, alligator,’ Kate called after her.
Suddenly, the girls were in the very periphery of Oriana’s consciousness and she did not respond.
She’s not very friendly, the girls concurred. We’ll not be inviting her to our place. We’ll not introduce her to our mum.
Eighteen years. A little over half her life. Instantly, her adulthood was condensed and reduced to a flick of light-speed separating the time when she was last here from now. The new cars – they were incongruous; as unbedded and jarring as a new and overly ornamental shrubbery might be in an overgrown garden. But the house – it was wonderfully, frighteningly, unchanged. Everything was recognizable and known. The mineralized rust around the leaking rain hopper which she always thought would be soft and slimy to the touch until she’d shinned up the drainpipe at twelve years old and found it to be hard and cold. The cracked pane in the fanlight above the front door. The chunk of stone missing from the base of the pillar of the portico, like a wedge of cake stolen. The strangulating cords of wisteria claiming the walls as their own, the defensive march of rose bushes skirting the house.
She started circumnavigating the building. Everything, denied for so long, felt forbidden. She moved lightly, quickly, holding her breath.
The familiar feel of the gravel underfoot.
The sound of it.
Tiptoe.
As in a dream, strange new details distorted the old reality. Curtains where there hadn’t been, now framing the windows of what had been the illustrator Gordon Bryce’s flat on the second floor. The customary tangle of flung bikes by the stone steps leading down to the cellars – but Oriana’s wasn’t amongst them. And no brambles by the yard. Instead, a residence now converted from the stables with an Audi parked outside on uniform cobbles.
Where do you play hide-and-seek these days then?
Oriana walked straight past her own front door at the side of the building, without once turning her head to acknowledge it. She was vaguely aware of the velvety-leaved pelargoniums in their soil-encrusted terracotta pots currently on the inside windowsills, where they’d be for another month or so before enjoying their summer sojourn out of doors. But she turned deaf ears to any sound that might seep through the gaps in the window frames. Those hateful old frames through which the icy breath of winter would slice into her sleep and the wasps in the summer would sneak in and target her.
Suddenly she heard it. The groan and creak of the great old cedar of Lebanon. She hurried ahead, towards the grounds at the back of the house and finally it came into view.
No one climbs me the way you used to, Oriana. The children are different these days. They play in different ways.
She walked quickly to the tree, crept under its boughs and up to the trunk. There, behind its protective barrier of branches welcoming her back into its fold once again, she wept.
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_b989d595-baf9-5bfb-9607-4cece66d8a62)
Tick tock. Eleven o’clock. Fuck me, thought Jed, why do I always oversleep when I’m here? He looked around the room, once his bedroom, and wondered why. It wasn’t even his bed any more; Malachy had sensibly replaced it with a sofa bed when he’d converted the room. Nothing of Jed’s past was visible. A couple of Robin’s small oils and four old framed prints of Derbyshire landscapes replaced the Cure and the Clash who’d once papered the walls alongside Echo and the Bunnymen. There was no sound from any of them anymore, Jed’s towers of vinyl LPs replaced long ago by CD versions which themselves had since been condensed further into virtual MP3 files. The walls were now uniformly white – whereas he’d painted all five of them in different hues. Red, black, purple, navy, orange. If he lifted the new carpet, the floorboards would still bear the spatters as evidence.
He stared at the ceiling; the long, snaking crack which his eyes had traversed for so many years while music played and his mind whirred with teenage emotion, was now Polyfillaed into a slightly raised scar. The huge paper lantern shade had gone, replaced with a neat, dimmable, three-light unit. When his parents had moved to Denmark a decade ago, they had signed the apartment over to him and Malachy. Jed had persuaded his brother to take on a mortgage and buy him out so that he could purchase his own place. Malachy was thus within his rights to make any changes he wished and the room had been sensibly, sensitively converted. Jed didn’t mind at all because, whatever the title deeds might say, this room was unmistakably his space and he always slept like a log here.
He showered and dressed, begrudgingly made a mug of instant coffee and took a pot of Greek yoghurt from the fridge, dolloping in honey from a sticky jar retrieved from the back of the cupboard. He thought, my brother’s fridge is empty save for beer and Greek bloody yoghurt. It wasn’t just a bit pathetic. Apart from the order and spryness of the spare room, the rest of the place was forlorn and dusty and the kitchen was a disgrace. And yet, of the two of them, Malachy was the together one, with the common sense and the poise and maturity, who avoided drama even if it made life dull.
‘Thieving cleaner-shag aside, of course,’ Jed murmured, taking a yoghurt through to the sitting room. Once the ballroom, its full-height windows flooded the room with spring sunlight, revealing just how in need of a clean they were while dust danced across the air with a we-don’t-care. Automatically, Jed glanced at the piano and yes, Malachy had indeed left him a message. He hadn’t bothered to check his phone: it wasn’t his brother’s style to text. Or to push a note under the bedroom door or stick it to the bathroom mirror or fridge. The piano had always been the place where messages were left.
J. We need food. M.
Two twenty-pound notes were stapled to the paper.
Jed grimaced at the bitter scorch of instant coffee masquerading as the real thing. He phoned the gallery.
‘Where the fuck is your coffee machine?’
‘It broke.’
‘OK. But where is it? I’ll fix it.’
‘I binned it. It smashed beyond repair when Csilla dropped it when she was stealing it.’
‘Oh. Shit. Sorry – I.’
‘I’m kidding, Jed. But I did bin it because it broke.’
‘Don’t you have a cafetière? For emergencies?’
‘No.’ Malachy paused. ‘I do have an old, stove-top coffee maker somewhere – but you’ll have to hunt for it.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ said Jed, hanging up.
Malachy anticipated the phone call which came twenty minutes later.
‘You shit!’ Jed said. ‘You could have told me you don’t have any bloody ground coffee before I searched high and low for the sodding pot.’
Malachy just laughed.
Jed was about to launch into something larkily insulting about all that Greek yoghurt, when he looked out to the garden and there was Oriana.
There was Oriana.
And Jed dropped the phone and just stared and stared while in the far-off recesses of his consciousness, Malachy’s voice was filtering up tinnily from the floor, calling Jed? Jed? You there, Jed? before everything went quiet and time was tossed in a centrifuge; the past battered, the present making no sense, the future wide open.
I am not the sort of bloke whose heart beats fast.
I will not be the sort of bloke with a lump in his throat.
I am not one to imagine things.
I am not a soft bastard.
I don’t do sentimentality.
But Oriana is out there.
Jed was at an utter loss. He’d stepped back, almost tripping. Now he was rooted to the spot, looking out as Oriana came away from the cedar and into full view. He watched as she glanced up to the ballroom window and away again, up to the window and down at her feet, shyness and perhaps dread, a multitude of emotions. And Jed loved Csilla Shag Cleaner just then for thieving and leaving, and leaving the cleaning of the windows which meant that Oriana couldn’t see him in there, gazing out at her.
And then he thought, but what if she goes? After all this time, and all that happened – what if she goes before I’ve talked to her? If she goes – was she ever really here? And then he thought, what if she’s not real? What if I let her go again – for another eighteen years?
Eighteen years? Is that all? Such a long time.
And then he thought, stop thinking and get out there. And he scrambled his bare feet into his brother’s docksiders that were a size too big, opened the double ballroom windows and stepped out on to the balcony.
The commotion caught Oriana’s attention.
She stood stock-still while the sunlight spun gold from her hair and cut a squint across her eyes.
Jed. It’s Jed.
‘Oriana?’ He was still on the balcony and she was still motionless. They stared and wondered, both of them, what are you doing here? How come you’re here?
I never thought I’d ever see you again.
Jed knew the move, though he hadn’t performed it for many, many years. He vaulted the balustrade of the balcony, and winched himself down, swinging against the wall of the house, grappling the descent like a crazy, out-of-practice, ropeless abseiler. The stone scuffed and grazed at his skin. He banged his knee. One of Malachy’s shoes fell off. The ground seemed far away. Suspended, he wondered if Oriana might be gone by the time he’d made the descent. He remembered how she’d sing the Spider-Man theme at him when he’d done this manoeuvre when they were young. With the tune once more in his head, bolstering him, and a mix of clumsiness and confidence, he made it down.
Terra firma. Rooted to the spot.
‘Oriana?’ His voice, barely audible to him, was painfully loud to her. And now she was turning away, moving off. No! He sprinted after her.
‘Wait!’
She stopped but didn’t turn. Tentatively, Jed stretched out his hand and laid it lightly on her shoulder. The wind, then, lifted her hair and wafted it over his skin, just quickly, in greeting. With great effort, she turned, not all the way, but enough. They glanced at each other, too nervous to move a step closer.
‘Are you back?’
‘Yes.’
‘Back – here?’
‘No.’
‘I –’ Jed shrugged.
Oriana raised her face, sucking her lips on words she could neither release nor swallow. ‘How are you?’ she asked. Formal.
‘I’m fine,’ he told her. And then he laughed. This was mad. Crazy. ‘I’m fine.’ He felt compelled to shake his head as if to dislodge any risk this might not be real. ‘And you?’
She scratched her head. ‘Just me.’ She shrugged.
Jed looked over his shoulder and nodded at the house. ‘Have you been in? Have you seen your dad?’
‘No.’ She followed his gaze though her childhood home was out of sight from here.
‘Are you going to?’
He watched as she stared at the house for a long time.
‘I don’t know.’ She fidgeted. ‘Not today, though. I haven’t – it’s been years. It’s all been years.’ She looked at him, marvelling shyly. ‘But you – you’re still here?’
Jed suddenly felt an extreme urgency – like meeting someone on a train, for whom this was the wrong train, someone who might just jump off as soon as they could and who he’d never see again. Oriana was here, at Windward, but he sensed it was momentary and he sensed this wasn’t her true destination. If it was a chance encounter then serendipity had to be shackled quickly – as if he’d have to grab her forcibly before he dared loosen his grip. He sensed he had limited time and, as such, he didn’t want to waste it on formal pleasantries but feared anything intimate might cause her to bolt. He just couldn’t think what to say. It was crazy. It was Oriana. It’s only Oriana. It’s only ever been Oriana.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘Here – Windward? Or UK here?’ She paused and shrugged. ‘Time for a change,’ she said, looking again at the house. ‘I was ready to come back. I didn’t think anyone would be here. I assumed everyone would have sold up and moved.’
Jed thought about telling her about his parents and Denmark and the mortgage and the nice new carpet in his old room. But it struck him that, as she hadn’t thought he’d be here, then she hadn’t returned to find him. His hope rapidly deflated.
Don’t ask about Malachy.
I’m not going to ask about Malachy.
They fidgeted with their thoughts.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked, genuinely sincere.
It was as if he’d said smile for the camera. He saw how she fixed a beatific expression to her face.
‘Oh, I’m fine! Fine. Just time to come back, really.’ She grinned and nodded and looked around and grinned and nodded and gave a satisfied sigh. It was pretty convincing – to someone who didn’t know her as well as he did, perhaps. He didn’t believe a word of it.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’d better go.’
‘Wait – can I? I mean – if you’re around, now – perhaps we can meet, just for a drink and a catch-up?’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll be sure to call you!’
An unconvincing transatlantic twang to her accent. Oh he could have taken her into his arms and said shut up you silly thing. And swung her around and kissed her and said I knew you’d come back, I knew I hadn’t lost you. Quick! he thought, give her your number before she changes her mind! He chanted his work number as well as his mobile to her though they came out in a tangle.
‘So – you’re not going in?’ He nodded at the house.
She glanced there and shrugged as though it was no big deal. ‘Not today,’ she said. It was as though she hadn’t intended to come, as though she’d just been passing and had suddenly remembered Windward was here. ‘I have to go.’ Though her voice wavered, she didn’t take her eyes off him as she stepped close and gave him a small, soft kiss on his cheek. ‘Bye, Jed. It’s so good to see you.’
He watched her walk away, taking the longer route around the opposite side of the house to her old home. And then she was gone and all that was there was the house. He spied Malachy’s rogue shoe on the grass, as though it had been flung off in glee. Jed looked down, surprised by his one bare foot. He hadn’t noticed. Had Oriana? He cringed. But it didn’t matter because he could feel the kiss on his cheek. He heard a car start, then listened as the sound of the engine faded. And then he thought shit, you stupid idiot. You didn’t take her number. What if she never calls? What if you never see her again? Having been this close.
* * *
It did cross Oriana’s mind that she was probably less safe to drive than if she had been ten times over the limit. But she needed to put distance between herself and Windward, so on she drove. She felt peculiar; light headed and slightly sick, hyper yet exhausted. Her throat was tight and her mouth was dry and her eyes itched with tears that she was furious about. She needed a drink of water. Perhaps she needed a drink. She drove on, thinking please be there, please be there. But the old petrol station was gone, a barren concrete slab the only remnant. She continued, heading helplessly into Blenthrop. She’d dive in, she decided quickly, buy water, perhaps walk around in a haze and then phone Cat. That was a good idea. Perhaps she’d be around this afternoon and Oriana could call on her to workshop through the headfuckness of what just happened.
The first thing she noticed was traffic wardens as though they were a newly introduced species. There was a one-way system too, which flummoxed her, but it led her to the car park by the library. It was much changed. She looked around – the little booth she remembered with the wizened old toothless man had gone. Invariably, he’d left the barrier up, but they’d never not paid. Now there were dictatorial signs everywhere. Pay & Display. She went to the machine and bought a ticket. At that price, an hour would be plenty.
Walking tentatively down Church Street, it felt initially as though all eyes were on her. But she knew it was doubtful that anyone knew her, and if they had known her years ago, they wouldn’t recognize her today because she’d be the last person on their minds. And wouldn’t most people have grown up and moved away or just grown old and died? There were a lot of pushchairs, it seemed. Pushed by parents perhaps a decade younger than she was. Changing times and with it, a new community. New housing. Self-service petrol from supermarket forecourts. She felt a stranger. She felt anonymous. She didn’t know a soul and it calmed her down.
The shops were all different and yet they seemed so established that she found it hard to remember what had been there when this had been her town. Marketplace was awash with stalls selling fruit and vegetables, sickly-smelling sweets and cheap dogs’ beds. A smart lorry with one side down had fresh fish on beds of tumbling ice scalpings. A van vending coffee. A stall selling crepes. A butcher yelling sausages! at passers-by like someone with Tourette’s. Where can one buy just a simple bottle of bloody water these days?
Remembering that there used to be a newsagent’s on Ashbourne Road, she headed there, pleased that, despite the disconcerting unfamiliarity, some things remained instinctive. Turn right. Go straight. Turn right. Oxfam! Oxfam’s still here! She peered through the window but it was all changed. It looked like a proper shop, brightly lit with veneered shelving carrying fancy goods, and she wondered where in town today’s teenagers went to rummage for clothes to customize. That’s new – that hairdresser’s. But that isn’t – the kitchen shop. It has a new name but it’s still a kitchen shop.
‘The White Peak Art Space,’ Oriana said quietly. A gallery in Blenthrop – there should always be a gallery in Blenthrop. She doubted that the old one, fusty with dingy oil paintings and insipid watercolours, had survived. To her relief, this new place appeared to be a proper gallery – not a shop selling dreadful generic pictures of sand dunes, or bluebell woods, or squirrels, or small children, all given the Adobe once-over. Nor was it full of annoying sayings on strips of distressed tin or weathered wood. It appeared to be a genuine showcase for artists, for talent; it seemed to be somewhere that Art mattered.
She looked in through the window. In pride of place, a sculpture: abstract yet compellingly figurative in essence – a surge or swoop in bronze that could be bird or fish or falling person. It didn’t matter which. On one wall, a series of large landscapes in oil, compellingly globular. She knew, even from this angle and through a plate-glass window, that they depicted Baslow Edge seen from Curbar Edge and the Kissing Stones of Bleaklow. They were rather wonderful, so thickly painted she thought the scent of the oils would probably still permeate. She could make out three people towards the back of the gallery, grouped deep in conversation around a plinth on which was a smaller version of the birdman fish. Oriana stepped inside quietly and went straight over to the landscapes. They were captivating and yes, they did indeed smell wonderful. She stood and looked and inhaled and forgot she was thirsty and forgot about Windward. Instead, she was out there, on the dales, reconnecting with the comforting solitude she’d always found there and it alleviated her prior agitation and grounded her. Yes, she thought to herself, I’ll just stand here awhile and get my breath back.
Malachy was too busy on the verge of a sale to notice much about the person who’d just come in. Lots of people came in to admire the landscapes by Natalie Fox. He didn’t mind. Art gladdens the heart. He liked it that people thought of the White Peak Art Space as not exclusively a commercial enterprise. It was good that passers-by came in to look at paintings, to stand awhile and consider them before leaving somehow nourished. This couple, looking at Swoop II, had been in the previous weekend and they were back and they liked it, they really liked it, but it was a lot of money and they weren’t sure what to do.
‘I offer financing,’ Malachy told them. And this sounded like an excellent idea because it was nought per cent and it meant that the artist had his money, Malachy had his commission and this nice couple could own their art on an affordable basis. He went to his desk to prepare the paperwork and noted the woman very close to the paintings, apparently sniffing them. He didn’t mind at all. When he’d finished the paperwork, however, he saw that she had gone. One day, he thought, one day someone will come in and buy all three. It sometimes happened like that; the unlikeliest of people suddenly turning up.
Oriana walked on and there, like an oasis in the yawing march of her memory, the small newsagent’s still stood. The only thing that had changed was that the Daily Mail now sponsored the shop sign, not the Daily Mirror, but from what Oriana had deduced since her return, this switch from left to right was par for the course nationwide. She bought water and Cadbury’s chocolate and possibly their only copy of the Guardian. The shopkeepers were new to her and had put their mark on the place with a tabletop unit containing exotic-looking pasties as well as a vending machine for coffee, tea and hot chocolate. Coffee. Coffee was a good idea. Even if it wasn’t good coffee, she suddenly craved something caffeinated and hot.
Slowly she walked, so as not to spill her drink and to give herself the chance to look up and around. Blenthrop, she was back in Blenthrop and it was no big deal. The town didn’t know her and the town was welcoming. With her coffee finished, she sent Cat a text, hoping to call in on her way back to Hathersage. Oriana decided to have one last look around the gallery before making tracks. The gallery, though, appeared to be empty, closed even. But Oriana thought I wonder if those people bought that sculpture? And it became a really provocative thought. How much was it? Who is the artist? But did they buy it? Just as she’d bought a paper and some chocolate and a coffee – had they come out on a Saturday and bought some art? She had to know. She tried the door and it opened.
In she went, her nose now finely tuned to the oily fragrance emanating from the landscapes. The gallery was Tardis-like; it was deceptively large and went back some way. She walked quickly over to the sculpture. A little red sticker – they did buy it! She felt peculiarly vindicated. It didn’t have a price on it but the artist was called Yuki McDonald. McDonald. Maybe the form was inspired by a slippery otter playing mercurially on a Scottish loch, or salmon leaping at Pitlochry. Yuki. Perhaps the form was linked with something more symbolic from Asia – a crane or some more mythical form. She went back to the landscapes and sensed the paintings draw her in, the same sensation the dales themselves had whenever she went there – they were to Oriana as the moors were to Cathy.
I wonder how much these paintings are?
They didn’t have a price. She turned to the opposite wall, wondering if anything here had a price. And, like a smack in the mouth and a blow to the heart, two of her father’s works glowered at her. She crept towards them. Robin Taylor, Depth I. Robin Taylor, Depth IV. Ink and mixed media on plasterboard. Her father once told her the women he painted were imagined, that his pictures weren’t portraits, they were impressions. But these women were staring at her as if they knew her, as if it was down to her to acknowledge their pain, take it on and free them. Just then, to Oriana, the White Peak Art Space became very dark indeed and she turned to leave.
Damn – I might have missed a sale.
Malachy had just come through from the back with a steaming mug of tea and a biscuit when Oriana reached the door.
‘Hullo – can I be of any help?’
Usually, people automatically say no thanks, just looking, to which Malachy always says it’s a gallery – feel free, which then leads on to varied and mostly interesting discussion about what they see when they look at art.
Just now, though, his offer garnered no response. Could be a foreign tourist though it was still early in the season. He put the mug down, took a quick bite of biscuit, wiped the crumbs on the back of his trousers and looked over towards the door where the woman had turned to stone. The tilt of her head, the whole of her. In an instant he knew who it was. Suddenly, he could no more speak than Oriana could move. The postman came in and stared at her as if she was some kooky installation. He stared at Malachy too, who was unable to take the bundle of post he was being handed.
‘Well, see you next week then, Malachy.’
‘Malachy as in key,’ Oriana said quietly, turning.
The postman had pronounced his name Malachy as in sky.
For the first time in eighteen years, Oriana and Malachy faced each other head on.
It’s OK, she said to herself. It’s OK. Don’t stare.
You need to look, she told herself, to see. Otherwise it’s rude – and ignoring it makes it more of an issue.
But don’t stare.
She noted how his hair was now delicately silvered here and there but still licked into the haphazard curls she’d never forgotten. As he approached, she caught his violet-grey eye colour striated like local Blue John. Sharp cheekbones and slim nose which always suggested an aloofness far from true.
And she had to acknowledge, for the first time, the eyepatch – a softened triangle of black protecting, concealing, his left eye; corded neatly around his head.
‘You have a beard, Malachy.’
He felt his face thoughtfully. ‘I couldn’t be arsed to shave last week,’ he said. ‘But you, Oriana – you haven’t changed a bit.’
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_e17d9e57-6dbb-541a-9ba5-180e42ab17f7)
‘You were sniffing Natalie Fox.’
‘There isn’t a sign saying “No Sniffing”.’
‘Oils should be sniffed, sculptures touched.’
‘Is this your gallery?’
‘Yes.’
‘You own it? It’s your career?’
‘Yes. You look – disappointed?’
‘It’s – it’s impressive. Congrats. But – what about being an author?’
‘A teenage daydream. But I still write. Still writing that novel.’
Silence. You don’t have to stare – but it’s a bit obvious you’re looking everywhere but at Malachy.
‘Is it?’ Oriana touched her own eye, as gently as if she was touching Malachy.
He shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago,’ he said softly.
‘But –’ Oriana wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear. She didn’t know whether Malachy would rather not talk about it. She was unsure whether it was impertinent for her, of all people, to ask. She hadn’t seen him for such a long time. And here he was, here was Malachy, changed and yet unchanged.
‘I lost it,’ he said in the same gentle tone. ‘My eye, my sight.’ He watched how she nodded but couldn’t look at him.
‘Sixty per cent of injured eyes become phthisical and require either evisceration or enucleation,’ he continued quickly, as if medical facts made it less personal, as if being in the majority made it somehow less severe.
‘I – I don’t know what those words mean,’ she struggled, staring hard at the floor.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
And Oriana thought how ridiculous it was that the word should come from Malachy. The constriction in her throat made it impossible for her to say so.
‘The terms, the minutiae,’ Malachy qualified, ‘they’re just part of my lexicon – I forget.’
Oriana glanced at him, then away, then to the door. Suddenly, Malachy really didn’t want her to go, not yet, not now she was back after such a very long time.
‘Beyond twenty feet, everyone sees the world as if they have only one eye,’ he said. He lifted her wrist and placed her hand over her eye. Pointing for her to look at the back of the gallery, he lifted her hand off, then on. He needed to change the subject, draw her back from the past to right here, in his gallery. An extraordinary thing that they should be marvelling about. ‘You’re back – from the States.’ It was a fact, not a question.
‘Yes.’
‘How long for?’
‘I’m back for good.’
Just then, to Oriana, the word seemed preposterous. Life on both sides of the Atlantic suddenly seemed ridiculously complicated. Where could she run to next? Australia?
‘Or for the time being,’ she added.
‘And are you in the area – for the time being?’
She nodded. ‘Hathersage.’
‘At your mother’s?’ He couldn’t contain his surprise and it made her giggle. He had her gaze once again.
She rolled her eyes at herself and shrugged. Pathetic really. Thirty-four years old and living with her mother.
‘And are you OK, Oriana? Are you all right?’
He always knew. He always knew when she wasn’t.
Malachy watched as she hauled herself to her tallest and pulled the widest smile possible across her face.
‘Oh, I’m good,’ she said, with drama and drawl to her inflection.
And then the gallery phone rang. And an elderly couple came in. Followed by a father and a teenage boy. And Malachy thought this is very, very bad timing. All of it. He knew that as soon as he turned away from her, returned to the demands of his day, Oriana would disappear. In the blink of an eye, she’d be gone. That’s what had happened all those years ago. Now you see her, now you don’t.
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_aa0d15e7-fe27-5930-8d1c-2390111afa03)
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’ Jed laughed at Malachy when he arrived at the gallery just before closing. ‘Sorry – I know I said lunch-time. The day ran away with me.’
His brother was just staring at him.
‘I bought food though,’ Jed said. ‘Including ground coffee.’
‘I just saw Oriana.’
Malachy watched the colour drain from Jed’s face while redness crept up his throat.
‘Oriana?’ Jed looked quickly around him. ‘Here?’
‘Here.’
‘How did she know you work here?’
‘She didn’t.’ Malachy paused. Jed was visibly flummoxed. ‘She literally showed up out of the blue,’ he told him. ‘She said she’s back from the States and living with her mother.’ Jed was speechless, staring at her father’s paintings as if they held a clue, if not an actual answer. ‘She was surprised I’m not a best-selling author. I completely forgot to ask her what she does.’
‘Did she leave a number?’
‘No.’ Malachy thought about it. ‘I wonder if Robin knows.’ He looked at Robin’s paintings too. He turned to Jed. ‘Did you pop in on him today?’
Jed hit his forehead. ‘Sorry – sorry. I didn’t. No.’
‘I’ll call in when we get back,’ said Malachy.
‘Will you tell him? About Oriana?’
Malachy thought about it. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Does he talk about her?’
‘Not really – sometimes he says her name, but in a disembodied way, as if it isn’t connected to a person, let alone his daughter. As if he just likes the taste of the word on his tongue.’
‘Did she –’ Jed wondered about this conversation, how to cut it off yet know everything before he did so. ‘Did she seem happy? Pleased to see you?’
Malachy thought about it. ‘I’d say she seemed flabbergasted.’ Then he thought about it. Terrified would have been a better word. ‘But she hadn’t changed, not really.’
‘You have,’ said Jed. ‘She hasn’t seen you since—’
‘I know,’ said Malachy. ‘I’m aware of that.’
Jed and Malachy drove back to Windward in their separate cars, privately picking over all the tiny details. From the silt of the past, undisturbed for so long, the seed bank of memories and dormant feelings was awakened. They were both acutely aware that if they talked about her, about what had happened, they’d spend the rest of the weekend doing so but getting nowhere. They also knew there was even less point pondering her return and mulling the what-ifs of her being here. Her absence had brought them closer. Her reappearance, however, could drive them apart.
Malachy parked precisely, Jed at a hasty slant across his brother’s car. His boot was crammed with shopping and they took the bags into the house. As they put the items away, they read out what each was, just as their mother used to. It gave a rhythm, a ritualization to it; a pointless family tradition that, when it was needed, carried meaning and comfort.
‘Was forty quid enough?’
‘Was it hell.’
‘I have cash.’
‘Forget about it.’
‘I’ll go and see Robin now.’
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘No – you’re fine, Jed.’
‘OK. Maybe I’ll swing by tomorrow. I’ll get the dinner ready – how about that?’
‘Sounds good. I won’t be long.’
Alone in the apartment, Jed sat down heavily. Why hadn’t he said, I saw her too? He could have been breezy, nonchalant even. She swung by the house! We had a quick chat! Why keep it from his brother when so much time had passed and after so much had happened? But Jed knew why. All he’d ever wanted to do was to keep Oriana all to himself.
Malachy left the apartment by the inner door connecting with the interior service corridor. He never used Robin’s front door. It would alarm him; Robin didn’t accept visitors any more. The Corridor was like a conduit between the private worlds within the apartments and the lives in the house over the decades. From staff in the eighteenth century going strictly and quickly about their business, to the scamper and larking of the children of the artists meandering and playing for hours on end nearly two hundred years later. Nowadays, though, it was the echoes of its past that rang out the most; the newer residents rarely used it.
As Malachy walked, it was impossible not to hear Oriana squealing her way along it on a tricycle, then a bike firstly with and then without stabilizers, soon enough her roller skates, and ultimately her skateboard. Malachy smiled, conjuring her up at the far end bowling for him while he waited right at the other end in full cricket whites with his bat at the ready. Out of the gloom the tennis balls came hurtling, him fending them off as if they were missiles while Oriana called, four! six! a hole in one! rounder! And, if she caught one, bull’s eye!
Teach me not to throw like a girl.
The recall so vivid it rooted him to the spot. He remembered how he’d come behind her, slipped his hand down to her wrist, tried to show her how to twist, flick. She’d tried and failed, growled at herself and stamped her feet, impatient at her ineptitude. Hurling balls here and there. It doesn’t work, Malachy – I can’t do it! I throw like a girl! And that was the first time he’d kissed her.
Malachy called through as he entered Robin’s place, though the sombre groan of the door and echoing thunk as he closed it would have announced his arrival anyway. There was nothing wrong with Robin’s hearing but it depended on which world he was in whether he actually registered it or not.
‘Hi, Robin!’
Silence.
Malachy whistled casually as he made his way from room to room. Not in the kitchen. Bathroom door open; towels on the rail, spirit-level straight. Study door closed. Malachy knocked, poked his head around. The day bed, with a tartan blanket flung back as if someone had suddenly become overheated; the swivel chair facing Malachy as if someone had only just now left it. The walls a latticework of shelves, bent and bowed with the weight of all the books and, in the spaces between the books and the next shelf, piles of papers, brochures, catalogues and magazines. The room could do with some air. And then Oriana’s room. Today, he felt he did want to see in there – but what if Robin had renovated it the way Malachy had Jed’s old room? What if nothing had changed and even the quickest glimpse hurled him back through time to a period during which he was happiest and at his most miserable? He took his hand off the knob, walked on to the sitting room and through to Robin’s studio. He was in there, at the easel behind a canvas, and Malachy could only see his legs and the legs of the stool on which he sat.
‘Hullo, Robin.’
Robin peered around the side of the canvas and stared for a moment.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Malachy – I just thought I’d pop in.’
‘Well, fuck off.’ Robin disappeared behind the canvas, muttering.
‘I’ll go and make you some soup, shall I?’ Malachy continued. He glanced around the room. There was no sign of any meals having been taken. All the mugs that were on various surfaces were crammed with paintbrushes and palette knives, pheasant feathers, knitting needles, flat wide pencils and small branches with curled and crusted leaves still clinging on. Tea bags in dried-out little dumps on surfaces here and there; on the windowsills cigarette butts balanced upright.
‘Have you eaten today?’
Robin didn’t bother to answer.
‘I’ll go and make you some soup,’ Malachy said again and he went into the kitchen, opened a cupboard and, under his breath, said oxtail, oxtail or oxtail? The interior of the cupboard was like a pastiche of an Andy Warhol screenprint.
‘Nice drop of oxtail,’ he called out. The pelargoniums on the sills needed water. He lifted the kettle, full but stone-cold, and gave the plants a drink. He hadn’t been in yesterday and the crockery on the rack was just as he’d left it the day before. Quite possibly, Robin hadn’t eaten since then. He looked in the breadbin and buttered the last two slices of bread, cutting a little mould off the crusts. He grated the last of the cheese because it was too hard to be palatable any other way. Robin had only an old-fashioned, free-standing gas cooker. With the soup heating up, Malachy lit the grill, ready to leap back as the flames licked along at ferocious speed and clawed out at him. Suddenly he remembered Oriana aged around twelve running into their apartment in floods of tears because she’d singed her fringe when grilling toast. The smell of burnt hair acrid in his nostrils even today. She’d been inconsolable. He and Jed had tried to tell her she looked fine while she sobbed and twanged off the brittle, sizzled ends. And he remembered how they had sat her down on a stool and, with solemnity and the kitchen scissors, had tried their best. Shorter they went, shorter still, until she looked like Louise Brooks.
The soup making audible phuts jolted Malachy back to the present. He popped the bread under the grill and watched like a hawk for it to brown before turning it carefully, adding the cheese and waiting until it seethed golden bubbles. He found a tray, placed on it the soup, cheese on toast, a tomato and a pint glass of cold water. He buffed the cutlery against his sleeve and folded a piece of kitchen roll into a triangle. He toyed with the idea of putting a pot of pelargoniums on the tray, but they were all encrusted with soil and Robin might well hurl it.
Malachy set the tray on the coffee table by the old sofa in the sitting room and went back into the studio.
‘Bon appétit.’
Robin glanced over. ‘Is it dinner time?’
‘It is,’ said Malachy. ‘Nice bit of soup – oxtail.’
Robin left his easel and pulled himself up to his formidable height, winding turps-soaked rags around his brushes. Then he straightened his tie, smoothed the waistcoat of his three-piece suit and lightly brushed down the sleeves of its jacket. Today, Malachy noticed tiny flecks of blue, like the lightest rain, on the Harris tweed. Robin glanced at Malachy as he passed by and sat down, his teeth snatching at the toast as he crammed it into his mouth. He made fast work of it. With his spoon hovering about the soup, he stared hard at Malachy.
‘Why are you staring? Why are you standing there?’ His voice was sharp and belligerent.
Malachy was wondering where Robin’s medication was – because it certainly wasn’t in its usual place on the coffee table. ‘Where are your tablets?’
‘I don’t know,’ Robin said, as if there was no reason why he should. ‘Now sod off and leave me to eat in peace.’
After a search, Malachy found the tablets in the bathroom. With one in the palm of his hand, he extended it to Robin who stared at it as if it was the first pill he’d ever seen, regarded Malachy as if he was poisoning him. But he placed it on his tongue, swallowing it down with a great glug of soup.
‘I’ll be off now,’ said Malachy. ‘I’ll pop in tomorrow.’ He thought of all the shopping Jed had bought. Despite the fetid air in the room and the smell of concentrated tinned soup, his own appetite hadn’t diminished. He’d bring Robin some fresh food tomorrow.
‘À demain.’
Malachy always said this as his parting remark. Some days, Robin repeated it. ‘Adam Man.’ Very occasionally, he laughed. Mostly, he didn’t respond at all.
Malachy left the apartment, appeased. Robin Taylor was still producing great art. One could forgive him his vile temper and foul mouth. Still, some days this was easier to do than at other times. And for some people, this was far simpler to achieve than it was for others. Today was not a day to mention Oriana. And perhaps Robin should not be told of her return.
It isn’t up to you.
That’s what Malachy had been told eighteen years ago.
It’s nothing to do with you.
That’s what they’d said when he found that she’d gone.
CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_9f714a1c-a25f-518b-99e4-55618e53b5da)
Oriana couldn’t help but think of Casey. Even though she’d managed to stick doggedly to her ban of permitting him anywhere near her memory for the last two or three months, she had little control over his voice ricocheting around her head today.
‘Headfuck,’ he’d say if he were here. ‘If that wasn’t one total headfuck, baby.’
And Oriana had to admit – he’d be right on that one.
She’d stilled the car. Daylight was fading. From a distance, resembling sheets of organza fluttering in a gentle breeze, the rain came sweeping over the dales in fast, cold, needle-sharp gusts. Concentrating on the sound of the weather on the roof of her mother’s car while watching thousands of droplets busying their way across the windscreen provided welcome respite from the barrage of thoughts. Soon enough, though, it all became a background blur as the crux of the matter came to the fore.
What on earth was she to make of what had happened that day? The immensity of it all. Windward, Jed and Malachy too. Facts and feelings were weaving around each other like snakes in a pit, moving too fast and mercurially for her to sort through and make sense of. Ashlyn, Cat – they would both willingly wade in to help, she had only to ask. But just then, she realized that to ask meant to involve; that she’d have to confide to the one or the other as much about her present as her past. There were things she didn’t want either of her friends to know, things she wanted under lock and key in a secret space. Bringing them into the open would only slice open fragile scars protecting deep wounds. A problem shared is a problem magnified. She wondered, why did I even go back there? What deluded part of me thought it could in any way be a good idea?
‘Idiot is my middle name,’ she said, resting her forehead against the steering wheel. ‘Idiot is my middle name.’ The mantra was comforting in its familiarity. Today, though, it suddenly brought Jed to the fore. How he used to love tinkering and warping the most mundane things, distorting words and situations in order to change something grave, awful even, into something ludicrous and light.
Oregano Idiot he called her when she was fretful, when she called herself an idiot, when he needed to make her feel all right.
‘So your mother gave up Robbing to live with Burning Safety.’
And he had flopped back in the long grass at the edge of the mowed lawn at Windward and pulled Oriana against his chest. She’d tuned in to his heartbeat while he hummed ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ on a blazingly sunny day.
* * *
Gladly she welcomed Pink Floyd into the car and played through the whole song in her head, even adding where the vinyl was scratchy and the one place the needle always jumped. But there came a point when she just had to let it fade out and she found herself still in her mother’s car with the weight of the day rendering her unable to know what to do for the best. She stared at Jed’s number now in her contacts lists. She opened the browser on her phone and searched for the White Peak Art Space website. She scoured it, reading Malachy’s profile on the About Us tab.
Malachy Bedwell was born in Derbyshire. He is the son of world-renowned architect Orlando Bedwell and Jette Stromsfeld, a furniture designer of international standing. He was the first child to be born at Windward, the artists’ collective that his parents founded in the late 1960s, with other seminal figures including Robin and Rachel Taylor, Gordon Bryce, Laurence Glaub, George and Lilac Camfield and Louis Bayford.
He credits the absolute assimilation of all arts into everyday life at Windward with his enduring passion for them.
‘As a baby, my mother fed me in a highchair designed by Gerrit Rietveld. I hung my school blazer on a Louise Bourgeois sculpture and read Agatha Christie novels whose covers were original Windward artworks. The soundtrack of my teenage years was either played at home or even written there. The phone would go and Celia Birtwell would simply say, “Hullo, Malachy – is your mother home? It’s Celia.” There’d be a knock at the door and someone would be standing there, asking, “Is Keith here?” and we’d go upstairs and tell Keith Richards that he had a visitor. Our cutlery was David Mellor prototypes. Our furniture was Bauhaus and beyond. We kept apples in a Bernard Leach bowl.’
Oriana looked up. I remember that bowl.
She remembered Keith too. And Marlon, his son. She’d had a huge crush on him. Jed and Malachy had taken the piss terribly though both their noses had been visibly out of joint too.
She read on, under her breath.
The White Peak Art Space seeks to unify the diverse talent of international artists inspired by Derbyshire. Whether they live here or abroad, whether they work figuratively or wholly abstract, whatever media they favour, our artists are united by the Peak District genius loci, the spirit of the place.
She felt proud of Malachy and yet strangely sad too. But you wanted to be a writer, Malachy. You and that great novel of yours. The White Peak Art Space arguably had philanthropic as well as financial value. But was it what Malachy truly wanted to do? She remembered him saying how he wanted to be the John Irving of his generation, having read The Hotel New Hampshire cover to cover twice in one week. How they’d all fallen about laughing! Now she felt sad, concerned. She wondered whether losing his eye had anything to do with it. She hoped not. She shuddered.
The rain had stopped and suddenly the sun was charging through and the wet landscape let off a glare; flares of light piercing through the windscreen. Headache weather.
Oriana thought, where do I go now?
Hathersage? Hathersage was no more home than San Francisco was. An image of the cedar at Windward loomed large – it was the place she’d always gone to for solace – something about shade and solitude under the embrace of the branches, the scent of the space around the trunk, the way the air was always a degree cooler than beyond the boughs, how the light from the day outside the tree was filtered into something else as it spun through the branches, the needles. It was a world within a world and for so many years it had been hers alone. In her youth, the other children had been put off it by a strange psychic who’d stayed at Windward and denounced the tree as the Place That Has Seen Death. But she couldn’t go back to the tree or Windward – not with Jed there ready to leap from the balcony and her father inside the house and two small unknown girls badgering to befriend her.
The paradox struck her – she was welcome the world over; welcome at Windward, in Hathersage, she could pitch up in California tomorrow and a dozen people would fling open their doors and arms for her. Yet just then it felt that there was nowhere that was hers, not one place she could truly call home. Other people’s places could never be anything other than halfway houses. She looked around her; this wasn’t even her car. Those were Bernard’s Werther’s Originals in the cup holder of her mother’s Peugeot. There was a synthetic-smelling cardboard air freshener in the shape of a smiley-faced strawberry dangling from the rear-view mirror and an oversized Road Map of the British Isles in the footwell, as if her mother and Bernard took to navigating a sweetly scented kingdom on a whim any day of the week. She thought, I’d never choose this type of car for my own. And then she thought, you ungrateful cow. She felt alone mostly because she knew she was defiantly turning her back on the few who were there for her.
Cat – her childhood friend who knew so much, but not everything.
Ashlyn – her closest friend who knew so much, but not everything.
Casey. Jed. Malachy. The men she’d loved, lost, left.
She traced her finger over the shiny lion emblem in the centre of her mother’s steering wheel.
‘It doesn’t matter how many questions there are if there can never be any answers.’
She thought, what a stupid thing to say out loud. She thought, I am not a teenage existentialist and I’m not a cod-philosophizing hippy even though I grew up with enough of them.
‘I’m thirty-bloody-four and there’s not a single certainty in my life.’
Oriana forced herself from looking inwards to watching how the dusk was now creeping across the moor like spilled treacle, edging its way in a slow but determined advance. Her fingertips were cold and she needed to blow her nose. If this had been her car, not her mother’s, she’d have had to use her sleeve. But she looked in the glove compartment and found, as she predicted, a packet of tissues. She gave the strawberry-faced air freshener an apologetic smile. She started the engine. She wanted to be indoors, by a fire, in an armchair, on her own with a cup of tea. She wanted to be home, wherever that was. The room which opened up in her mind’s eye wasn’t in San Francisco nor was it in Windward but it was as well known to her as either. She started the car, made a U-turn and drove.
Django McCabe watched the headlights send stuttering beams into his quiet Saturday evening as the car made its way along the lurch and swerve of his unmade driveway. Sometimes, he experienced sights as sound and, though from inside the house he couldn’t hear the car’s engine, its lights were like an uninvited visitor with a grating voice asking for a favour he wasn’t actually prepared to give.
‘You can bugger off for a start,’ he muttered, taking his mug of Bovril and heading for the utility room where he sat down and said bugger, bugger off. He thought to himself how the more social a person was in their heyday – as he had been to a legendary extent – then the more justified was a cantankerous dotage. So bugger off, whoever you are, this is my Saturday evening. I’m closed.
But the voice, when it called out, baffled him. He was expecting the brittle but strident tone of the village busybody. Perhaps the gruff hail of someone off to the Rag and Thistle. More likely, the gently melodious greeting from the vicar who had called in with alarming regularity over recent months despite Django having visited the church only twice – and once was accidental. But he wasn’t expecting the voice of someone young. And female.
‘Knock knock. Django? It’s Oriana.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#ulink_35f87825-5e97-5a88-b992-f1eb1beeea48)
Cat put the phone down and looked at it thoughtfully.
Ben watched. ‘Everything OK?’
She nodded slowly. ‘I think so.’
‘Do you want any more pizza?’
She looked at the box, in which the two remaining slices looked now to be made of the same cardboard. ‘No, thanks.’ She knew her husband would wrap them in tinfoil and have them for breakfast, cold.
‘That was Django.’
‘I gathered.’
‘Oriana dropped in.’ Cat thought about it. ‘She stayed for two hours.’
‘That was nice of her?’ Ben was unsure why Cat appeared disconcerted.
‘He said she asked to go upstairs and then she wandered around, looking in rooms and standing deep in thought.’
‘And?’ Ben didn’t want to comment too much – the umbilical cord appeared to be syphoning off much of his wife’s patience and sense of humour. If that was the case, their baby would be imperturbable and have great comic timing.
‘It’s just –’ Cat thought about it. ‘She’s my oldest friend – I know everything about her.’ Absent-mindedly, she pressed at her jutting navel as if trying to keep thoughts in. ‘But when I saw her, it struck me that she was just ever so slightly guarded – as if there was something essential she was concealing.’
‘Maybe she didn’t want to say in front of Django?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous – Django’s world famous for being unshockable.’
‘I wouldn’t take it personally.’
‘Why wouldn’t I? She’s my oldest friend. God! You just don’t understand!’
Ben counted to ten in his head. ‘Well – perhaps she was just passing?’
Cat looked at him as if he was dense. Django lived so off the beaten track that impromptu visits always necessitated an involved detour and a certain level of planning.
‘Did Django say where she was on her way to – or back from – to make a trip to his plausible?’
There was a long pause. ‘She’d been to Windward,’ Cat said. ‘That’s why it’s weird. She went back to Windward. Just like that.’ She rubbed her belly thoughtfully, as if hoping to elicit the genie from the lamp.
‘And you wanted to go with her?’ Ben was trying to second-guess. Cat looked at him blankly. ‘Or – you wanted her to let you know she was going? Or had been?’
‘You would’ve thought she’d’ve phoned me.’ She felt hot, uncomfortable. ‘Whatever. Doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s watch telly. Can I have a cuppa?’
Ben took the pizza boxes into the kitchen, Cat muted the sound on the television, randomly channel hopping while managing her thoughts. Why is Oriana back? Why would she go to Windward anyway? Why hadn’t she told her – beforehand or straight after? And she thought, have we grown apart? Can friendships not last such lapses? If all you have in common is a shared past, is that reason enough to believe you’ll always be as close as you were? To Cat just then, the past was neither halcyon nor troubling, it was simply a long, long time ago.
Ben made tea and thought to himself how often he had heard his patients who were pregnant complain that people treated them differently – as if growing a baby equated to diminished brain cells and the incapacity for any conversation other than about babies. They felt excluded because of some misplaced need of others to protect them from any topic anything other than bland ones. And, for the most part, they didn’t like it. My baby’s stolen my identity! one had declared. He thought about Oriana. He’d only met her a few times, when they were all living in the United States but, through Cat, he felt he knew her well enough. He remembered how, if ever he answered her call, the first words she’d always say were sorry to bother you.
‘She’ll call,’ he told his wife. ‘She’s probably just worried about bothering you.’
* * *
In Hathersage, no one asked any searching questions. It was enough that ‘Did you have a nice day?’ was met with ‘Yes, thanks, did you?’ In fact, most of the questions came from Oriana who tactfully chose topics she knew Rachel and Bernard could answer at length. The route to Wakefield. The Bennets’ house. What they’d had for their dinner. And their tea. The weather forecast tomorrow. The amount of detail that anodyne subjects warranted was surprising and insubstantial minutiae floated through the evening like musak until it was a respectable time to turn in. As Oriana climbed the stairs, she thought to herself, that’s probably the longest conversation I have ever had with my mother.
It was only after cleaning her teeth, when she caught sight of herself in the mirror unawares, that the magnitude of the day that was closing swept over her again. But it wasn’t what had happened or where she had been. At that moment it wasn’t even whom she had seen. It was who had seen her, looking like this.
Frequently, since her return from the US, her mother had remarked how thin Oriana looked. But ‘thin’ implied something gently fragile, like a bird, like a Hans Christian Andersen character, something young and pretty and ethereal, waif-like. Butterfly wings and gentle breeze and dandelion heads and spun sugar. ‘Thin’ brought out the protective in others. But, now she looked, Oriana didn’t see thin. She saw haggard. She saw gaunt grey. She saw someone to baulk at, to shy away from; to think Christ, she’s aged, she looks terrible. What the fuck happened to Oriana? they’d say. Have you seen her these days? Old beyond her years.
‘Mum!’ She called out before she’d even opened the bathroom door, let alone unlocked it. ‘Mum!’
Rachel’s bedroom door opened. Oriana must have been in conversation with her reflection for quite some time if her mother’s bleariness was anything to go by.
‘What is it? Honey – you OK?’
Bernard could be heard from the gloom of the room saying everything OK? everything OK? like a daft old parrot trying to keep up with the action.
‘It’s fine,’ Rachel called back at him. ‘We’re good.’
‘My hair,’ Oriana wailed. ‘Look at it! I look hideous. Do you have a good hairdresser? Are they open Sundays?’
‘You look fine,’ said Rachel, agitated. ‘You’re a bit thin – but you’re tired. Go to sleep and yes, I have a hairdresser,’ and she touched her own hair as if to double-check. ‘And no, they’re not open Sundays.’
‘They are in the lead-up to Christmas, love,’ came Bernard’s voice.
‘It’s fucking April!’ Rachel seethed over her shoulder, before clapping her hand over her mouth, wondering how long it had been – truly, how many years – since she’d sworn like that. ‘Look what you made me do!’ she hissed at Oriana. ‘Just go to sleep, for God’s sake.’ Reproach and dislike creased her face.
Rachel had never spoken to Bernard like that, never. She held his hand tightly as she lay awake, frowning into the dark. Her daughter should not have come back and, just then, she really resented her. Oriana was rested, fed, had a roof over her head, their home and car at her disposal and yet she looked worse now than when she arrived. Where was the gratitude in that? Into the conspiratorial darkness, Rachel let her thoughts find support. She liked her daughter less when she was troubled. In fact, she liked her less when she was in direct contact. If their relationship was to survive – or even go back to how it had been – she really did need her out of the house. Emails and occasional phone calls – that’s when they’d rubbed along best. She actually didn’t much like her at all – an unpleasant sensation that made her feel unwell. Distance and time could alleviate it. It had done so in the past, after all.
* * *
At Windward, Oriana wasn’t mentioned at all that evening. Instead, the Bedwell brothers drank beer and watched sport and shouted at the teams on the television. It was innocuous and boorish, akin to watching in the pub, commentating on the game with people they hardly knew. And Malachy and Jed should have steered clear of Scotch. But the match was over and the beer was gone, so out came the Laphroaig which took the pub philosophizing to the next level as they spouted argumentatively on politics and policies, each brother taking a turn at pulling on the garb of the devil’s advocate and wrestling each other for it.
Jed should have said no to whisky. He didn’t have the stomach for it, especially not after European lager and the disappointment of a two–nil defeat. Consequently, he became very drunk, very quickly and, after decimating bankers, Russian oligarchs and the Tories, he staggered off to bed mid-sentence, only to throw up later in the early hours.
Malachy heard his brother chucking his guts up. Malachy should have said no to whisky too. It didn’t make him paralytic, it made him insomniac and introspective. He hadn’t yet slept when Jed went stumbling to the bathroom. He’d been sitting up in bed, initially comforted by the pitch darkness making him equally blind in his good eye. Velvet black and even. He just sat in bed, appreciating the sensation of both eyes being open and both eyes seeing nothing; feeling that peculiar warmth that came with night-time silence and obscurity, nothing material to see, to imagine, to tax the eye – either eye. But then, the undeniable sense that darkness is not a constant but a flux; forms beginning to emerge as his good eye told his lost eye what they were. Mahogany chest. Flung shirt. Door frame. Right shoe. Something else – wallet. What’s my wallet doing on the floor? Left shoe. Handles on the wardrobe doors that look like cartoon eyes.
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