Thirteen
In London, Clare stuffed a month’s worth of post under an arm and carried her overnight bag up the stairs. She unlocked the internal door to her flat, letting out a blend of mustiness from the old wooden floors and the comforting aroma of brewed tea. She tossed the post on a table, then wandered from room to room, unscrewing locks and pushing up sash windows. Soon, there was a warm breeze blowing through the flat, the sound of honking traffic and wailing sirens, and she felt an inner peace at the familiarity of being at home.
In the kitchen, which seemed narrower than she remembered, Clare secured her task list to the fridge with a magnet Guy had given her for their first wedding anniversary: Trust me I’m a barrister. She gave a wry laugh. He’d never cared about the difference between a solicitor and a barrister.
‘Same difference,’ he had said. ‘Lawyers! You all charge through the nose and by the hour.’
This to Guy was an insult. If you charged for your time, you were prevented from being a free spirit by the ever-present demands of billable hours. At points in her career, she had been inclined to agree with him, but for the next ten months she wouldn’t have to worry about charging anyone. She did, however, have to manage her time carefully. If she wanted to attend the parish council meeting, Clare had just two days to pack up the flat and gorge on her favourite takeaways.
Clare started in the spare bedroom, which no one had used for five years; it had been Guy’s home gym. Being a rally driver required stamina, strength and quick reflexes and when he was separated from his beloved car he trained to improve his reaction times. It was also where Guy and his co-driver refined and memorized pace notes.
The room had never previously struck her as small but comparing it to the one she’d slept in for the last couple of months, today it seemed cramped. She opened the wardrobe. The sight of cardboard boxes piled in a precarious stack in the space for hanging clothes was like an arrow to her heart. She sagged onto the bed. She should have done this years ago.
After Guy died, lacking the strength to decide what to keep, Clare had sold the gym equipment, replaced it with a bed and bundled everything else into these boxes, stuffing in clothes, toiletries, maps and Guy’s notes. Unable to separate keepsakes from junk, she’d sealed it all up together.
Clare shook open a bin bag, pulled out a box at random and delved into the past. Half an hour later, the rubbish bag was bulging, and a small collection of papers and trinkets lay on the duvet. She picked up a glossy brochure - a hotel on the Isle of Wight where they had stayed when Guy competed in a rally there. He’d won, and that night they’d joyfully celebrated with champagne, the thrill of his victory electrifying the air between them. They had lingered at dinner, hands brushing and later they’d made love. She held the brochure a moment longer before setting it aside, then rifled through the rest of the pile, dispatching crumpled maps and scribbled pace notes into the bin liner beside her. As she worked, a photo slipped free, fluttering to the floor.
She bent to pick it up. It was Guy with a much younger red-haired woman. She flipped it over, recognizing Guy’s squiggly handwriting:
Hannah and me .
She frowned. Who was Hannah? Was she the girlfriend of another driver? She couldn’t recall ever meeting her. She peered more closely. There was a look of awe on the woman’s face – she must have been one of Guy’s groupies. Well, there’d been plenty of those , she thought. Clare had gotten used to them early on in the relationship; it was something you learned to live with if you were dating a good-looking rally driver. So, what was unnerving her about this one? She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something told her to be wary. She dropped the photo into the bin bag thinking it was odd that this was the first photo of one of his groupies she’d found.
She got up off the bed and smoothed down her blouse. She still had to clear out all of her belongings; she didn’t have time to comb through the rest of Guy’s stuff. She would take it all back with her to Brambleton
Clare wiggled the last box into the footwell and shut the door. The boot was full, and the back seat piled so high she would have to rely on her wing mirrors. Clare joined the queuing traffic on the South Circular. Being stationary was irritating, not just because it delayed her journey, but also because it allowed her mind to wander, and she kept seeing that photo of Guy with ‘Hannah’. What did it mean? Maybe she wasn’t a groupie – just a friend of his co-driver or the sister of another driver? But if so, why had Clare never met her?
Maybe Hannah had connections with another more successful rally team and Guy hadn’t mentioned her because he didn’t want to get his wife’s hopes up? But that couldn’t be it. Guy was supremely confident in his talents; he would have told her if there was a sniff of a lucrative transfer.
To distract herself, once she was on the motorway, Clare pulled into the inside lane and called her travel agent on her hands-free phone, asking her with a heavy sigh to cancel the rest of this year’s bookings. She had barely thought about her sabbatical in the past week – she had been so busy with BARS, but vaguely recalled she should be somewhere in Croatia now. She finished the call and told herself the glass was half-full – she had only cancelled the first six months of her trip. Then she consulted a scribbled list taped to the dashboard and, using her voice command, started calling the five parish councillors. The first three didn’t pick up, but the fourth call was answered by a woman with a strong North-Devonian accent: ‘Pat Mayhew.’
‘Pat, my name’s Clare Hetherington. I wanted to talk to you about the upcoming parish council meeting.’
‘Ah, I knew your mother. She was a fine woman. What’s on your mind?’
‘Chickens.’
‘Umm.’
‘Can I ask your views on the planning application?’
There was a snort. ‘I won’t talk in advance of the meeting, but if that jumped-up— If he thinks we’re all going to roll over and vote in favour just because he’s in the chair ...’
A smile spread across Clare’s face, and she thanked Pat for her time.
Traffic whipped past the car while Clare thought about how Cindy would have reacted to Richard’s plans. Her mother would have been apoplectic if he’d even hinted that unpaid service on the parish council entitled him to preferential treatment. Feeling confident, she called the final name – Hazel Jones.
For a second time she was lucky: her call was answered, and Hazel was happy to talk about chickens. But that was when Clare’s luck ran out. Hazel pointed out that the chicken farm would provide three permanent jobs, and, in Hazel’s opinion, if people didn’t like the sight and smell of farming, they shouldn’t move to the countryside. No prizes for guessing which way Ms Jones planned to vote. That was one in each corner – to win, BARS needed two out of the other three councillors to stand up to Richard, who wouldn’t be able to vote.
It took another four hours to reach Brambleton. To keep her mind off Guy, Clare repeatedly called but failed to reach the other councillors. She would have to wait another night to discover their views.