Chapter Five
‘The Wilkinson family seem to have had a particularly eventful life. Miles Wilkinson (1738–1800, when he probably died just for a rest) married no less than five times, with each marriage producing seven children. The eldest offspring from each of the various marriages was named after Miles, so for anyone tracing their family tree and finding a Miles Wilkinson on one of the branches — the very best of luck to you.’ — BOOK OF THE DEAD 2
* * *
Both Alex and his mother had forgotten to give me directions to the primary school, but it wasn’t too hard to find; I just waited until half past three and then followed the screaming. Scarlet was waiting inside the gate, holding the hand of a woman wearing what Daisy would no doubt have had trendy words for, but I could only call a smock. In the other hand she held Light Bulb.
Scarlet’s face lit up when she saw me, and the thumb she’d been sucking slid out of her mouth. ‘Winter!’
‘I’ve come to get you, your uncle has a delivery and your grandma, well, I’m not quite sure what’s going on there but it seems to involve quite a lot of widdle.’
The woman holding Scarlet frowned at me. ‘I’m afraid I can’t let this young lady go anywhere with you without parental permission.’ She couldn’t have been much older than me, or possibly younger but with the slightly tense look that some primary teachers tend towards giving her a prematurely crinkled forehead. ‘Which we don’t have.’
‘But it’s Winter,’ Scarlet said, baffled. ‘And Alex must have told her to come and get me, otherwise how would she know where to come?’
The woman crouched down. ‘Sweetie, you know we can’t just let you go with anyone, can we? Remember the talk we had last term? About keeping safe?’
Scarlet looked as nonplussed as was possible for an eight-year-old. ‘I’ve got Light Bulb. No one can hurt me while I’ve got him,’ and she patted the stick in much the same way as I imagine a ninja would stroke his nunchuk.
‘But what if someone wanted to take Light Bulb away and hurt him?’ There was a patience in this young woman that impressed me. She genuinely seemed fond of Scarlet, and anybody who could treat that cloth and broom handle as a sentient being was either eight, insane or born to childcare.
Scarlet made an illustrative face, ninety per cent teeth, and with fingers held up like claws. I didn’t know about anyone wanting to hurt Light Bulb, but I wouldn’t have tackled her.
‘Could you not go and telephone Alex, perhaps?’ I suggested.
When I used Alex’s name the woman straightened and looked me up and down in a kind of half-assessing, half-cautious way. Oh. I see. That’s how the land lies, is it? But then, I shouldn’t think eligible single men come on the market all that often in a place this size — Alex must be the local equivalent of El Dorado. The proper one, obviously, not the rubbish TV programme.
‘Alex doesn’t do phones. ’Cos of his stammer,’ Scarlet supplied. ‘You can phone Granny, I s’pose, on her mobile.’
‘She was going to the hospital though, she won’t have her phone on in there, will she?’ I sighed. ‘Look, Miss . . .’
‘It’s Ms. Ms Charlton,’ and then, softening when I didn’t raise my eyebrows at the Ms bit, ‘Lucy. Look, school policy is not to let children go with anyone other than a named adult.’
‘Can’t I go by myself?’ Scarlet was stroking Light Bulb’s unresisting ears. ‘The big ones do, they walk home by themselves. I could walk home by myself with Winter.’
We adults looked at one another. I could see Lucy trying not to grin and I was fighting my own inclination to snort. ‘If you’re sure,’ Lucy said. ‘And if you make sure that Light Bulb is careful near the road, you wouldn’t want him to get loose in traffic, would you?’
She went up in my estimation again right there, although I still wasn’t sure about the smock. Never mind what Daisy might say about fashion, it made her look pregnant. Unless she was, of course, but even so it was a crime against Vogue . ‘I promise I’ll keep an eye on her. I’m taking her to the Old Mill anyway, so you could always come past on your way home and check she’s safely there.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ and the speed with which she took my suggestion told me I’d been right to suspect that Lucy Charlton had a bit of a ‘thing’ for Alex. But then, who wouldn’t? I mean, I found myself smiling at the thought of his rock-dusted hair, and doing something a bit more basic at the memory of his bare chest, and he wasn’t even my type. ‘I haven’t seen Al . . . I mean, Mr Hill, for a while, I’ll do that. Be careful, Scarlet.’
Scarlet mounted Light Bulb in her usual exaggerated fashion, and we literally trotted off down the road. ‘He’s a bit fresh. He has to spend the day in Mr Moore’s office, but it’s all right because he has a hay net.’
Light Bulb shied dramatically at a rubbish bin as he and Scarlet dashed along the pavement. The mist had cleared with the afternoon and the sun was warm, which was just as well because Scarlet was only wearing a summer dress. Her bare legs were scraped and scrubbed with rashes and the grazes of childhood and were very vulnerable-looking under the pink checked cotton and above the ankle socks that I bet had started the day as white.
‘Shall we get an ice cream?’ I found myself asking, unexpectedly.
‘Ooh, yes!’ Light Bulb performed a dressage manoeuvre and circled back along the pavement towards me. ‘Can we eat them in the park?’
Great Leys has a park? Why? Ninety per cent of it is countryside anyway, what have they done, bunged a set of swings up in a field?
It turned out that that was pretty much exactly what they had done. We sat on a bench and ate Cornettos, while Light Bulb grazed, or at least lay face down on the grass in front of us. Without the bike helmet Scarlet’s hair was curly and had obviously been cut by someone with more enthusiasm than talent — it was slightly lopsided at the back and her fringe looked more like an amateur comb-over — but she seemed entirely unselfconscious as she sat next to me, digging one sandalled toe into the peaty earth.
‘Where do your mummy and daddy live?’ she asked me unexpectedly, staring at two big lads shouting at one another from the swings.
‘My parents split up five years ago. My mother lives in France and my dad went back to America, where he’s from.’ And I still feel the pain of their divorce, although they’ve tried not to bother me with it.
‘So you must get really nice holidays then.’
‘Well, I’ve just spent six months in Paris with my mum, but it didn’t really qualify as a holiday. I was plotting out the new book.’
‘Has your dad taken you to Disney World yet?’ She was licking her ice cream with determination and regarding me from those curiously adult eyes, but without the adult level of prurience that I was used to from personal questioning. She simply wanted the facts, ma’am.
‘I’m a bit old for Disney World, I think, besides he lives in Maine and that’s quite a long way away. I think,’ I added, hastily, since my knowledge of the geography of the United States was a bit shaky, even given my parentage.
‘My mummy and dad split up before I was born. He was called Jamie.’ It was hard to know how Scarlet felt about anything, I realised. Those eyes, unlike her uncle’s, gave nothing away, and besides, I was far more used to reading men than eight-year-old girls. She could have been trying to make me understand how it was to grow up with no parents or she could simply be giving me information. ‘So now Alex and Granny look after me.’
‘So where do you live?’
A frown, as though she had never really thought about it. ‘Where Mummy and I lived before. With Alex.’
‘And where does Alex live?’ This being the information I really wanted. Did he live at home, with his mother, in his old childhood room with an entire adolescence-worth of . . . let me think, he didn’t look the type for girlie-mags . . . Doctor Who merchandise all over the surfaces and a Star Wars duvet cover?
‘At the Old Mill. Up at the top. I’ll show you my bedroom if you like, and Light Bulb’s stable.’ A last chew saw the ice cream gone and she was up and on her feet again.
The park was swarming with children now, all in various stages of disrobing from school uniform, climbing on the wooden frame, draping themselves over the tyre swings, while adults chatted and watched with half an eye. No one approached us, I noticed. None of the children came to talk to Scarlet, not even some of the pinker little girls, with their hair in complicated plaits, who looked around the same age. They were sitting together making daisy chains, while Scarlet had collected Light Bulb from his prone position and was trotting him round and round in a circle. His benevolent expression was already beginning to get on my nerves.
‘We’d better go. I don’t want Ms Charlton to find you’re not at the Old Mill when she gets there, she looks the type to call out the police first and set homework later.’
Scarlet obediently followed me out of the park and along the tree-lined lane that led to the main road and the Old Mill. Great Leys was only about half a mile from end to end, residential streets orbiting the High Street, through which the river ran like a self-conscious tourist attraction, green banked and beducked as it was. The main road which passed through on its way to the industrial north wasn’t even that main, a B road which clipped the eastern end of the town, over the old iron bridge and then away. Even the traffic didn’t want to hang around Great Leys.
Different. Not like London. This would all be cars and buses and yelling; dropped litter and the taste of diesel in the air, grass contained in parks not containing sheep. And shops. And museums and art galleries and railway stations.
I realised I hadn’t driven my car for three days. Hadn’t even checked it was still where I’d left it — parked up near Margaret’s Victorian villa just off the High Street. I shrugged to myself. If anything had happened to it, I’d bet Margaret knew the names of the offenders, their addresses and, probably, their library card numbers.
Scarlet swung in through the archway to the Old Mill, Light Bulb’s wooden stick bobbing about as she cantered up the yard. Off to one side I could see a big lorry disgorging a load of timber and, as we went inside the building, I saw Alex supervising the unloading. The lorry’s engine was running and a hydraulic crane ground its gears as it lifted the wooden beams, so everything was being done with hand signals. He’d taken his shirt off again and was wearing a safety helmet and gloves, which made him look like Mr September in a construction-man pin-up calendar. He’d obviously worked most of the summer with the shirt off, his torso was tanned evenly under the customary cosmetic dusting of stone.
I wondered how old he was. He had the laughter lines and worn hands of someone in their late thirties, but the body of someone much younger; the way his jeans hugged his thighs and the nicely-rounded contours of his buttocks said late twenties. No grey tones in his hair. I supposed I could just ask Scarlet, she’d probably tell me his shoe size and taste in music too without much prompting.
I was slightly embarrassed when he looked up, across the lorry, and caught me staring at him. I tried to do an expression of surprise, as though my eyes had been wandering around and had only recently settled on him, rather than having been running over his bare midriff for what felt like hours. He grinned and gave me a double thumbs-up, then one of the other men helping unload tapped him on the shoulder and he bent low to hear what they were saying, so I figured this was a good time to stop staring and find out where Scarlet was. Possibly rescue her from that coffee machine, which looked more than capable of holding a child to ransom.
She was waiting for me in the big atrium. ‘Up here.’
‘I’m not sure.’ My brief had been to bring her home, not go through his CD collection. But I can’t just leave her, can I? Alex is busy, what if she falls down or the coffee machine gets her? ‘Okay. But I can’t stay long, just until Alex finishes.’
‘I want to show you my bedroom.’
It was a flat on the top floor of the mill. One wall still had the door I’d noticed from the outside, for hauling grain in, and the roof was all beams and hooks, high above our heads. Open plan, one end was a swish kitchen, the rest filled with sofas, a TV, and more shelves of pony books than anyone outside The British Horse Society could live with. Scarlet opened a door and ran through into a corridor, charging on down to the end and giving me not much choice but to follow her, staring around me all the time at the Farrow & Ball paint choices and the framed pencil sketches on the walls. It was all so nicely done that I wondered if Alex was secretly an interior designer.
Such a contrast to Dan’s flat which was all windows. Where we stood and looked at the view over the park as the sun flowed across us like a river of light. One huge couch and a rug, all scattered with papers, the smell of age-old dog fur and cigarette smoke from previous inhabitants layered through the rooms. Casual, unstudied, like Dan himself. And on one wall, the hand-drawn sketches for the tattoo he bore on his wrist, a design he’d created and immortalised on his own body. ‘Chaos,’ he’d said when I looked. ‘The secret of the universe.’
‘Here!’ Triumphantly Scarlet threw open the door at the end of the passage to reveal . . . well. To say she had an obsession with ponies would be to underplay the decor to quite an extreme level. There were posters of ponies. Pony wallpaper. Model ponies. Pony duvet set, pony curtains and a pony rug beside the pony slippers. Too long in that room and you’d slip species. ‘And this is Light Bulb’s stable.’ A walk-in wardrobe, possibly, on the architect’s plans, its polished wooden floor strewn with straw, an old orange-net filled with hay tied to a beam, a plastic tub of water in the corner. On a shelf stood an old hairbrush and plastic dog comb.
My heart ached.
Scarlet propped Light Bulb against the wall, removed his plastic bridle and began brushing his wooden stick body with the hairbrush. ‘He gets a bit sweaty when he’s excited,’ she explained. ‘I should have made him walk home, but he loves to canter.’ Oh, Winter, you should have stuck to the dead people. You know where you are with them.
‘Did,’ I began, carefully, watching her start to brush out the string tail, ‘did your mummy give you Light Bulb?’
She didn’t even hesitate in the brushing. ‘It was my birthday two days before she died. I was five and Light Bulb was my present.’ Now she’d got a swathe of fabric, something like a piece of old fleece. ‘You’ll have to wear your rug until you stop being sweaty, or you might catch a cold,’ she advised the horse-designate.
‘Don’t leave his rug on,’ I found myself saying.
‘What?’
‘When you’re hot you don’t put something on, do you? Let him cool down first, then rug him up.’ What am I doing? He’s a broomhandle with a stupid face!
Slowly Scarlet peeled the fleece off. ‘It says in my horse book that they have to cool down slowly,’ she said, somewhat sulkily.
‘But I bet your horse books are aimed at . . . ummm . . . little children? Not the sort of grown up books that you need now.’ An idea. Sudden, not all that welcome, and not sure where it came from, unless it was kicked into being by those eyes, so much like her uncle’s. ‘Look. Next weekend, if Alex says it’s okay, why don’t we go into’ — I mentally blundered through the local map in my head — ‘York, and look for some new books on horse care?’ Winter, Winter, you don’t even like children! You’ve never even thought about children! Actually, that’s not quite true, is it? With Dan, just that once, when you lay looking at him sleeping and you imagined that jawline, that curve of nose, those beautiful eyes transposed onto a child, your child. Yours and his. That one moment, before you thought about sleepless nights, where you’d live, how you’d be able to write and research with a baby, but in that one, breathless moment you thought about having Dan’s baby.
Scarlet was rotating with delight. ‘Alex will let me! Can we go to McDonald’s too?’
Oh, the privations of a small town life, which make McDonald’s look like a treat. I was floundering my way around a reply when Alex came into the room, still shirtless but now minus the safety helmet. From the way Scarlet launched herself at him, armed with a stream of words about how much she wanted me to take her to York and how Light Bulb had behaved that day and how she’d got a list of spellings to learn, I think he wished he’d left the helmet on.
‘I’d better go. Got some stuff to get on with.’ I didn’t really, such work as I’d done was backed up for the day and all that remained to do was to eat something, watch the tiny television and go to bed, but I needed some space. Eight-year-old enthusiasm and energy made me want to lie very still for a while.
‘I . . .’ Alex waved a hand to indicate the still-talking Scarlet, ‘I’ll m-message you. Th-thank you, Winter, you’ve been g-great.’
As I walked out of the room I had to move past him, still standing in the doorway with Scarlet doing her impression of a small moon orbiting a gas giant. He flashed me that smile, and I could feel the heat from his body, smell the dust and timber on his skin giving my libido a good kicking. Even the sight of a Fiat 500 driving into the yard with Lucy Charlton at the wheel and skidding to a halt that Schumacher would have regarded as a bit reckless didn’t kill it. In fact, the feeling stayed with me all the way back to the cottage, a feeling that had been in abeyance since Dan and I split up.
I needed to talk to Daisy.