Chapter Thirteen
We’re quiet as we progress up the driveway, Nick, Felix and I matching our pace to Emma’s, all of us preoccupied with our thoughts.
It’s a clear morning, with a glaring winter sun that bounces off the deep frost that’s set in overnight, icing the surrounding meadows with white.
The sheep, clustered together for warmth, are motionless.
Everything feels very still. Not even a breath of a breeze disrupts the frigid air, and the cold feels like a solid, immovable thing.
Emma’s brought a KeepCup of herbal tea with her.
I eye her, resting her lips on the rim, breathing in the steam that rises over her face, and feel really angry that Blake’s insisted she do this.
But then I guess we’ve all been forced through worse in our time.
Much worse. And Emma’s tough. Far tougher than I suspect a lot of people give her credit for, with her doll-like appearance and track record of playing the nice girl.
She started out in this business as a Disney Mouseketeer, and already had three movies under her belt by the time Felix and I met on The Go-Between: teen romances, which she made into box office smashes, playing the pretty, ditzy heroine.
That’s not easy work, not at all – I’ve personally tried and failed at it – but I can see how it could get old, when you’re doing it on repeat.
‘Which I of course did for the best part of fifteen years,’ Emma said to me, back in September, when we were getting to know one another during rehearsals.
‘I wanted to change things up, so bad, but my agent kept telling me I needed to stay in lane, be grateful I was still getting cast. You know, at my age.’
He apparently blew up last year when she changed lane anyway, accepting a part Ana referred her for, playing one of five people left on earth in a dark dystopian love story.
‘Career suicide, apparently,’ she said.
It was that movie, though, that she won her Oscar for, as best actress in a supporting role.
And Imogen saw it, loved it, and went straight to the casting team for this one, strongly suggesting they consider Emma for Clare.
(‘That’s a hill I was willing to die on,’ she’s told me.
‘Just as you had to be Iris, Emma had to be Clare.’) Emma’s agent was happier about that.
The buzz around this adaptation was at fever-pitch, even then.
He’s less happy now, however.
Emma told me earlier that he called last night, having spoken to the studio, and suggested she ease their cost concerns by reducing her fee.
‘He said it would be a nice gesture,’ she said.
‘Nice. Like I care about any of them thinking that way about me. I asked him if he’s ever asked one of his male clients to make a nice gesture like that, and he got all indignant, so now I guess I really do have to find a new agent.
’ She shrugged. ‘Whatever. It’s overdue. ’
I’ve recommended her my agency.
They’ve never advised me to be nice.
Turning from her, I look ahead to the woods, thinking of Iris and Robbie’s cottage.
But then, I’m always thinking about their cottage on some level.
And now I’m thinking about The Screen’s article again too, narrowing my eyes on the woods’ trees, wondering who, if not Blake, has been observing me heading in and out of them.
Clearly not anyone who gives a damn about me – or certainly not enough of one to think to check if I’m ok before running to The Screen with their supposed concerns over my mental health.
‘What have you been doing in the woods?’ Nick asked me, last night.
‘Just getting away from it all,’ I said, and didn’t mention the cottage, because I still haven’t told him about it.
I wish I had.
More than ever, I wish I’d just been honest with him about it from the get-go, but if it felt hard to do that back on Sunday when I first found it, it feels impossible now I’ve kept it from him for the best part of a week.
And I truly don’t know how I’d even begin trying to explain how often I’ve been drawn back to its ruins, going whenever I’ve been able to snatch a moment, just to sit by that gatepost, with tears pouring down my face, and my fingers touching the grooves of Robbie’s name.
It’s too … irrational.
Too deranged.
Honestly, I can barely admit to myself that it’s something I’ve been doing.
He knows I’m keeping something from him, I have no doubt about that. I’ve seen his anxious looks. It’s come to me, since The Screen’s article, that a lot of people have been throwing them my way this week – Felix and Emma included – and I hate it. Hate that I’ve let myself become a worry.
Again.
I have tried to stop going to the woods. Every time I’m there, I hear those murmurs, carrying through the trees’ swaying branches: the voices, and that laughter, which doesn’t seem to belong entirely to this world, and might almost, if such a thing were possible, be echoes from another.
But such a thing isn’t possible.
Rationally, I know that.
Yet, more and more, to my own despair, I’ve found myself questioning the truth of it.
Especially when I’m in Iris’s bedroom. I keep finding myself back up there, too.
That much I have told Nick about, because I promised him I would, but he thinks I’m there running lines, when what I’m really doing is watching Iris’s window, listening to the air, and standing in front of her mirror, holding her hairgrip, waiting for another glimpse of that face, which, in my very maddest moments, I think might actually have been hers: young, and bright, with rouged lips, dark hair, and a direct gaze that penetrates mine.
‘Will you take me up?’ Nick’s asked me. ‘I’d like to see it.’
‘Then I’ll take you,’ I’ve told him, but haven’t proposed a time, or said that it will have to be in daylight because I’m too afraid to return again at night.
So, how many secrets does that bring my tally up to?
I don’t attempt the sum.
I don’t actually want to know.
And I’ve got more, anyway.
Like, that banging I keep hearing in the house, but which I can’t find the source of, even though I’ve now scoured every one of the sets – from the library, to the station commander’s office, to my and Emma’s bedroom.
I can’t hear it, Ana said, when I mentioned it to her.
I can’t hear a thing, said Imogen, on the phone.
And, probably, I should ask someone else about it, but I can’t bring myself to.
Because what if I’ve been imagining it, too?
What if I’ve been imagining that bird?
It’s silent now, but I peer upwards into the pale, empty sky anyway, replaying how completely Rusty ignored its call when she was out with her wrangler.
I’ve been agonising over her oblivion ever since, and the more I’ve agonised, the surer I’ve become that Rusty’s exemplary behaviour makes no sense. That bird’s screech is piercing.
Surely, Rusty’s ears should have pricked up for it, at the very least?
‘What are you looking at?’ asks Nick, bringing my attention back to earth.
I turn to him, and, seeing his frown, realise I’m worrying him.
Yet again.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Fresh air.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘All right,’ he says, but he’s not convinced, and his frown doesn’t go.
He’s still worried.
So am I.
I’m beyond worried.
I just have no idea what to do about it.
So, for now, I do the only thing I can do. It’s the same thing I’ve been doing all week.
I do my level best to bury what I’m feeling – willing it, so hard, away – and keep putting one precarious foot in front of the other.
Unlike the rest of us, this won’t be Nick’s first visit to Heaton, or the Heaton Arms; he’s come in plenty on his research trips, and leads the way there, out of Doverley through an old servants’ gateway that he discovered a while ago – avoiding the main entrance and any lurking reporters, since none of us want to be hounded the entire way to the village – then across a patchwork of icy fields, where a herd of hypothermic-looking cows are, thankfully, our only company.
‘Think they remember you?’ says Emma, nodding at the cows with a smile.
‘Of course,’ I reply, smiling too, but distractedly, preoccupied with the déjà vu I’ve once again found myself swimming in, from the moment Nick heaved open that servants’ gate, and which has deepened with every step we’ve taken towards Heaton.
It all but overcomes me when, emerging from the fields, we reach the village itself, its glistening rooftops coming into view.
The pub’s on the outskirts, at the end of a lane called Bramble Rise, so we don’t go all the way into the centre.
I still get a good look at it though as we pass by, my pace slowing as I take in its frosted houses, stone church, glassy pond, village green, and war memorial.
I know this place, I think, just as I did when I first arrived at Doverley, I have been here before.
And here, of course, I have. I’ve run across the green.
Thrown stale bread for ducks in the pond.
Sat in the church. There was a man there who used to stare at me, with hard, blue eyes.
His face rises up from deep within my memory, making me tense with hatred.
Then, just as quickly, it vanishes again, sinking back into my subconscious.
Gladly, I let the man, whoever he was, go, and settle my focus on the war memorial.
It’s Remembrance Sunday this weekend. We all have poppies fixed to our coats.
There’ll be a service here in Heaton on Sunday morning, but none of us on the movie will come to it; we don’t want to turn it into a press frenzy.
Instead, we’ll pause filming to lay wreaths at Doverley’s memorial.
Justin Holmes – who’s playing Jacob, Mabel’s Fury’s bomb aimer – is an incredible musician, and will play the last post. No photos or recordings will be allowed, and that feels right.
Decent.
Really, it’s the least we can do, given how much everyone’s hoping to profit from the loss being marked.