Chapter Twelve
‘Gravestones can be heart-rending, funny, an attempt on behalf of the stonemason to try out every type of lettering he’s learned; they can be decorative and inspiring. But up here, on the North Yorkshire moors, in one of the highest, most bleak parts of the country, there isn’t much time for fancy, either during life or after death. The Osborne family, who lived, worked and died up on the high moors, seem to have got this down to a fine art. Witness one William Osborne, whose stone reads simply: ‘Wm Osborne. Died Jan 1815. Killed by bull.’ — BOOK OF THE DEAD 2
* * *
‘He kissed you?’
‘Yes, Daisy, I just said that.’ I leaned my back against the wall by the bed. It was dark, it was late, but I couldn’t sleep until I’d updated my sister with this latest development.
‘And how did it make you feel?’
I took a deep breath. ‘Oh, he got it just right. None of that awful groin-thrust that some of them do, no trying to lick the face off me. It was sweet. It was kind. ’
‘Hmm.’ Daisy sounded slightly annoyed. ‘That’s not what I asked, Win. I asked how it made you feel, not what his technique was like.’
I shuffled my feet under the duvet, but kept my back against the plaster of the wall for the cool reassurance of its solidity. ‘I feel . . . Seriously, Daze, I like Alex. He’s calm and pretty stable, if you don’t count all that guilt he’s got going on, which, and I hate to admit it, makes him a little bit more human. Otherwise he’s just this well-built bloke with the looks of an action hero, a gorgeous home and a future of financial stability.’
‘And?’
‘Does there have to be an “and”?’
Daisy sighed. ‘Yes, Winter, I think there does.’
‘Okay, okay. I think I fancy him, but I just don’t know if I trust what I feel any more. But then again, I’m old enough to know what I think, so—’
‘Two buts, Win. You know you’re only allowed one, with a possibility of a half a one for “but he’s too rich and successful and glamorous, and or famous”. Two buts mean he isn’t for you, you’re just trying to talk yourself into it.’
‘Look, I’ve only just met the bloke. He might even have something going on with Scarlet’s teacher, I haven’t really got to the bottom of that yet. We’ve had one dinner and one little kiss — I think I can give things a bit longer before I have to decide, don’t you?’
‘Okay.’ She sounded as though she was smiling now, which was a relief. I’d hesitated about talking to her until I got to bed, slightly worried that she might have given me some kind of moralistic homily about how I was rebounding and it wasn’t fair on Alex, etc etc. Instead she seemed to be taking it all quite seriously. ‘Just be careful, Win.’
‘It’s all right, he’s not going to throw a Dan on us. He’s more laid-back than Dan anyway, a bit more . . . I can’t explain it. Less . . .’ I made a sort of ‘clutching into my stomach’ gesture which, of course, she couldn’t see.
‘A bit more and also less.’ She was definitely smiling now. ‘Sounds more like a French perfume ad to me. ‘’E is a leetle more . . . and yet ’e is also a leetle less.’
‘Shut up or I shall never speak to you again.’ I was laughing at her terrible French accent.
‘Yeah, right. Laters, Win.’ And she was gone, like the ethereal being she was.
I picked up the photo I had beside the bed and grinned at her in it. It was us on our twenty-first birthday, nine years younger, nine years slimmer, arms around one another. We were both bending with laughter, me wearing a classical green dress that swept the floor and left my shoulders and arms bare, Daisy in her trademark mini-dress, very retro, very 60s, all geometric circles that made us both feel sick to look at by the end of the evening, but beneath it her legs had gone on forever. ‘Night, Daze,’ I whispered to it. Then I curled up under the duvet. Well, I had to curl up, if I’d stretched out my feet would have been on the landing.
That was the thing about being a twin. One of the things that Dan hadn’t understood. I was never alone. Oh, she wasn’t here in the room with me, but I always knew that, wherever she was, wherever I might be, my sister was there for me. We were two different people, led two very different lives, and yet the inexplicable connection played between us. It lay, like a permanently open telephone line that ran heart-to-heart, as though within us we each carried a part of the other.
Besides, she knew all the bad stuff about me, and vice versa, we had a lot invested in keeping each other close.
Winter Gregory Author Page
You know that feeling when something happens and you’re not sure how you feel about it, or how you *should* feel about it? That.
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Tanis Brown: If it’s to do with the new book — we’re going to LOVE it!
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Wednesday morning dawned through a drizzly grey mist. I sat in front of the laptop for a few hours, mostly spent on Facebook, ran a tiny iron over the dress I’d decided to wear to talk to the book group, and turned out half a dozen copies of Book of the Dead that had been sitting in the boot of my car. I washed my hair and tried to make myself look presentable, and was just making myself a quick cup of coffee when Margaret’s head appeared beyond the glass panel.
‘Oh, good, you’re ready. You are ready, aren’t you? I mean, is cleavage very “novelist”?’
I narrowed my eyes and considered saying that John Grisham wore a Zara maxi-dress to do all his talks that gave him a cleavage like the Grand Canyon, but decided against it. ‘I haven’t got a lot of suitable clothes with me,’ I said, being very tactful in the circumstances. ‘Besides, it shouldn’t really matter, as long as I look professional.’
I put my two-buttoned London coat on over the dress and followed Margaret as she led the way across the High Street and down a narrow lane beside the river. ‘We meet in the old hall, by the bridge,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘We’ve got some new additions this week. One is a gentleman who’s just visiting Great Leys and is staying with me. On a B he seemed almost to be asleep on that chair, his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles in a way that, if he wasn’t careful, would link the buckles on his boots and cause much staggering when he tried to stand. His coat was almost doubled around his body and his hair was weirdly misshapen, up on one side and flat on the other, as though his left hand side had been frightened.
‘Any questions?’ I finished, brightly. Dan was not going to know how sick I felt at seeing him, how my hands were bunching into fists at the sight of his face. There were a couple of well-thought-out questions from the writing group at the front, a long, and rather unfocussed diatribe on breaking into publishing from one of the mid-fifties men, and then Margaret was motioning for someone to turn on the tea urn and rattling a biscuit tin like a call to arms.
What are you going to do? You could run, make your excuses. Hide. But then, if you have to face him, if he’s come here to find you, wouldn’t it be better to do it here, in front of all these people, where he won’t be able to deal those vicious little hurts with such precision? Even Margaret might come to your defence if you start getting personally attacked in front of her book group, although, looking at them, they may just take it as affirmation of the bonkers nature of writers.
‘Tea, Winter? I’ve saved you some digestives here. The group can be rather lively when there’s chocolate involved, so I thought it would be a good idea to put some back.’ Margaret waved a packet and a loaded teacup. I tried to immerse myself in the conversation starting between two members, something, anything to stop my eyes from wandering over to that back corner of the room, where he lurked like a Scooby Doo villain, still seated, arms folded. Waiting. For me. Chuckle, chuckle, laugh, throw in some advice, pretend just as hard as you can, Winter, that the man you can sense moving across the room doesn’t exist.
‘Miss Gregory?’ A hand on my shoulder. A touch so light that it almost shouldn’t have registered, but it did, like the weight of an entire life. ‘I wonder, could I have a word?’
So. This was it. This was how it happened. I turned slowly to face him. Didn’t smile. Met his dark stare with one of my own. ‘Anything you want to say, Mr Bekener, you can say here.’
Nobody else seemed to notice. No one could feel that cooling of the air as though a savage and very local climate change was taking place, or smell that sulphurous burning that pricked my nostrils, which was probably just whatever fancy brand of cologne Dan had chosen to wear but smelled to me like something satanic. They all just kept chatting among themselves, for all the world as though I wasn’t slowly being dragged to hell.
Dan nodded. There was a tautness to him; I wondered if it had always been there. A wary set to his muscles, even in his face. His eyes seemed larger, as though he was shocked by something, his narrow face tired under the stubble. ‘I just wanted to . . .’ his voice lowered even further, syllables dropping under his mild Lincolnshire accent. He must have been suffering some kind of trauma because he usually covered those giveaway vowel sounds with an assumed London jauntiness, he hated people thinking he was from some rural backwater, even though he was. ‘I needed to see that you were all right.’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ I answered, equally quietly. There were several directions this conversation could have gone in, and I didn’t want most of them to be overheard. My heart had steadied now that we were actually talking, although there was a stripe of sweat down my spine that told me I wasn’t nearly as calm as my autonomic nervous system would have me believe.
‘With what happened. The way we split, the way you were, I was worried. And you went off without telling anyone at Shy Owl where you were going.’ He raised a hand as though in an awkwardly unilateral shrug. ‘We’ve got money invested in you and the new book, so I needed to know that you were working.’
‘You didn’t have to come in person,’ I said around a smile. At least, my mouth was giving smiling its best shot. I had the feeling that my eyes were sucking any trace of humour from my expression.
‘You’ve changed your phone number. I tried emailing but you didn’t answer. You weren’t giving much away on Twitter or Facebook, so I rang your mum. She said you’d left France and gone to Yorkshire, I thought that was a bit of a desperate move, so I decided I ought to come up and make sure you . . .’ he tailed off. Margaret was standing poised by the urn with a slightly suspicious look on her face, watching us talking. ‘That’s my landlady. Does she have some kind of allergy?’
‘It’s her dress.’
‘Bizarre.’ Dan looked down at his feet. His boots were scuffed and muddied around the soles. ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said, randomly.
His eyes looked almost bruised, their normal darkness shaded with insomnia as though he was wearing make-up and when he looked down like that I could see how hollow his cheeks were. I will not feel sorry for him. I know how he operates.
‘You look tired,’ and I was surprised, no, appalled, to hear how gentle my voice sounded. His eyes flicked up as though I’d scared him.
‘I should go.’
‘Yes.’
We both stood and looked at one another. ‘And the book is going well? I can tell them that much, that you’re on for the deadline?’
I averted my eyes. ‘It’s okay.’
His personality seemed to slip, as though the Dan I’d known before was under tight restraint, but still in there. ‘Come on, kiddo, it’s doing your head in, isn’t it?’
No! No, Winter, don’t you dare, don’t give him so much as a sniff of your insecurity. He’ll take it and use it to jemmy your life wide open again. ‘It’s got a bit . . . stuck.’ You idiot.
He took a cup of tea from the table. There were new rings on his fingers, a plain silver band replaced the Celtic knot I’d bought him and the thought that his life had changed, that things had happened, he’d bought things, without me knowing, made an accordion of my lungs.
‘We need that book, Winter,’ he said, his voice sliding underneath the warm-air rise of the conversations around us. ‘Yeah, you’re okay living on the back of Book of the Dead , but we’re not doing so well at the moment. And I need . . .’ another tiny shrug, ‘I need the work.’
Not the money. It wasn’t money that Dan prized, it was the feeling of being needed, of putting his head down and grafting to put a book together. ‘You could go freelance?’
Now those eyes were on me. In contrast to Alex’s calm grey eyes, Dan’s looked like the eyes of a mischievous child. He’d always had eyes that seemed to contain a gateway to another, far more chaotic, universe, as though a wild magic was barely kept in check within his body. ‘Yeah, well.’ That half-shrug again and a tilt of the head. ‘Maybe I’m losing the edge there.’ He sipped at the tea, but half-heartedly, and then put the cup down. Came in so close that I could smell a kind of frost-chill on him. ‘I want this work . This book.’
I shuffled a hurried step back. ‘Like I said, things are fine. Go back to London, Dan.’
On the far side of the room, Margaret, deep in conversation with the elderly couple, glanced over and frowned. I fixed a smile on my face and tried to look as though I was having a fun chat with a fan. ‘I just need to sort a few things out and it will all go smoothly from there.’
‘Yeah, right.’ To my surprise he took my cup and put it down next to his. ‘Let me help you.’
My adrenal glands nearly burned their way through my dress. ‘I don’t need your help.’
‘You said that before.’
‘And I meant it then too.’
‘But . . .’ Then he sighed and folded the coat around himself again. The stiff fabric made an aching sound. ‘I’m not just going away, you know that, don’t you? I can’t come all this way and then turn round, head back to London and say “oh yeah, she’s cool, not writing anything mind, but I’m sure it’ll come good in the end”. Not to a bunch of guys who are pretty much existing on the money from the last book and pennies they find in the street. They need assurances, we all need assurances, that you’re coming in on time with this one and that it’s going to be worth the time and effort, right?’
I bridled. ‘I know what I’m doing!’ It came out far louder than I’d intended, and there was a lull in the conversation as a roomful of faces turned our way and I had to do the ‘fun smile’ again for a few moments until they lost interest. ‘I said, I don’t need your help, Daniel.’
Spread hands, like surrender, but I knew him better than that. ‘Can’t stop me hanging around though, can you? Just keeping an eye, cracking the old whip.’
I pursed my lips at him and tried to think of something cutting to say. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to tell Daisy,’ I finally said and watched him freeze up, pulling his collar to his ears.
‘You and she . . . you’re still talking to Daisy? After everything I said?’
‘She’s my sister . And you, you’re nothing .’ And I spun around and marched over to Margaret, turning my back on Daniel Bekener and the expression I’d seen radiating from his eyes, a confused kind of sadness and what looked like an underlying horror.