Chapter 1
I’m lost. I can’t be more than ten miles from the house where I was born, but the roads have changed since I learned to drive here, and I’ve been travelling for twenty-six hours now, and somehow I’ve missed the turn. I’m crying so hard I can’t see the road properly and I don’t even know if I care.
When I finally pull in to the side of the road and park, I’m on a market square. There’s a church, a bank, flowerbeds . . .
And a gold pillar box.
“What’s a pillar box?” Kai asked me once.
“Mailbox,” I told him. “But like the blue ones on the street, not the things on sticks at the end of the drive.”
I really am ten miles from home then. This is Dunblane, where Andy Murray survived a school shooting and trained for all those medals. They painted this pillar box gold for him, because he belongs.
The air is cold around my ears when I step out and the solid flank of the pillar box is just as cold against my palms. I let my head drop forward and stand hugging Sir Andy’s tribute like a drunk with a lamppost, sobbing, making raw, painful noises that will wreck my voice for days, as if something at the core of me has broken.
Because something at the core of me has.
Even when I see the old woman, walking stick held in one hand and letter ready to post in the other, I can’t catch a hold of myself and get normal.
She comes towards me slow and steady, her back still straight although she must be eighty if a day, smartly belted into a mackintosh and wearing the kind of shoes you have to get your foot width measured for.
“Who have you lost?” she asks, in a clear voice, when she’s close enough for me to look into her grey eyes.
“How-How-How did you know?” I gulp it out on a tide of snot.
“A long life with its fair share,” she tells me. “There, there.”
I take a sniff and swallow, then screw my eyes up tight to try to choke off the tears. When I open them, she’s holding out a packet of tissues. “There, there,” she says again.
I don’t think anyone has ever actually said those words out loud to me in my life and before today I would have guessed they’d infuriate me as much as all the other platitudes, but there’s something about her calm voice or her kind face, or maybe it’s the absence of any eagerness in her expression.
She lacks avidity. She doesn’t want to know all about it.
She’s not compiling an anecdote for later about the messy woman she met at the postbox.
She’s being calmly kind. Kindly calm. Like no one has been to me since—
“My husband,” I tell her.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “That’s awful. You poor thing.”
They’re the same words people have written in texts and on cards, the same stock phrases people murmured at me in the receiving line. But they mean something coming from her, and they comfort me.
“We’re— We’ve always been— We were very happy.” I still have to take a good run at putting him in the past.
“And so young,” she says. “I got fifty years of that happiness. It’s cruel that you didn’t. It’s an outrage.”
“I’m sorry too,” I say. “For you. It can’t be easy no matter when.”
It’s the first time in the whole three months since Kai died that I’ve managed to summon a shred of sympathy for another person. She brushes it aside. “I got what lucky people get. You’re either left or you leave. Quite different from your calamity, my dear.”
Calamity. A perfect word. It slams and it leaves you rattling.
I find myself nodding. “And I’m jet-lagged too. I came home from Hawaii.”
“Were you on holiday?” she says. “Was it an accident?”
“No, we lived there. He was from there. I’m from here.”
“Welcome home,” she says, smiling. “It’s a great pull, isn’t it? Even when away is Hawaii, it seems.”
We’ve reached the natural end of what must be an insignificant encounter for her but feels like balm to me.
As if to confirm it, the red post van draws up beside us and the postie gets out to empty the box.
I try to keep smiling back at her but my face must fall because, instead of moving off, she puts her hand out and says, “Peggy March. Why don’t you come and have a cup of tea? ”
I take her hand, as thin and soft as a bird’s wing, and shake it gently. “Lindsay Hale,” I say. “Thank you.”
She sets off at a decent clip, after a nod for the postie, and she doesn’t feel the need to talk.
So I get a chance to pull myself together as we go up the high street, past shops and businesses, to where stone walls and neat hedges suddenly begin.
I can see chimneys and gables and the tops of copper beech and oak trees.
“Here we are,” she says when we’ve been walking for another few minutes. “Saint Helen’s.”
“What a nice house,” I say. It’s not effusive enough by half, because “Saint Helen’s” is a beautiful house and enormous too.
“I love it,” Mrs. March says. “I always have. It’s Edwardian, not Georgian, not even Victorian, so house snobs are horrified, but I’ve always been very happy here. Come away round the back and I’ll put the kettle on.”
Round the back, beyond a boot room, there’s a kitchen with red tiles on the floor and the kind of comfortable mishmash of odd chairs and cupboards that takes decades to gather.
“English breakfast?” she says. “Milk? I’m going to insist on sugar whether you want it or not. And a biscuit. See what there is in that black tin there. See it? The jubilee biscuit tin.”
I’m looking for a spanking new tin from Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee, so it takes a while to spot the battered black-and-gold drum with Victoria’s little pudding face in a medallion on the front.
I prise it open and find KitKats and Penguins inside.
I take one of each and, once the kettle’s boiled and she’s dunched the bags against the sides of our mugs, she leads me through a warren of passageways and across a hall until we get to a room that’s all windows at one end, overlooking a garden.
The furniture is more of the same, shabbier than shabby chic but grander too.
I settle into an armchair with a faded linen slipcover and put my mug down on one of those brass tables like a tray with a clothes airer holding it up.
“So,” she says when she has unwrapped the Penguin and dunked the end of it in her mug. “Are you sure about leaving the place you were happy together, dear? Haven’t you heard the adage about big decisions? A year, they say. And it’s surely been nothing like a year.”
“Twelve weeks,” I tell her.
“Unspeakable,” she says. “I’m furious for you.
” She sucks the warm chocolate off the end of the Penguin then takes the bare biscuit out of her mouth and adds, “But you have decades of life ahead of you.” She must think that’s comforting, but to me it sounds bleak.
So I say nothing. I just peel open my KitKat and dunk it, since she is.
“And no one will try to tidy you away as if you’re too old to count,” she adds after a while. I shrug. I’ve lost all squeamishness about old people referring to their imminent death. After Kai, at forty, they sound smug.
“When Richard died,” she goes on, “people kept informing me that I would be moving somewhere small and dull. I got sick of having to say I would stay here in my house until they nailed the lid down on me. ‘But the garden!’ they’d say.
‘I shall get a gardener,’ I told them. ‘But the stairs!’ ‘Ah, but the wonder of a house that is miles too big is that I can live in the downstairs, should I ever need to.’ Which I don’t. ”
“Good for you,” I say. “When I find a house I like, I think I’ll do the same.”
“And where are you going to look?”
I laugh. “Here. My best friend still lives here. My family owns the junkyard in Menstrie.”
“Lord’s Yard’s is still on the go?” she says with a smile.
She sets her empty mug aside and, no matter what she says, I think she’s very vital for a woman her age.
She’s downed the hot tea while I’m still blowing on mine.
“My days of treasure hunting are long gone, but Richard used to love a poke around Lord’s Yard. ”
“It’s home,” I say.
“Home,” she agrees, looking around at her walls and her floor and her furniture. “Never let anyone tell you it’s only bricks and mortar. Home matters.”
“The house in Hilo—” But my voice breaks. “I better go,” I say instead, then I thank her for the tea and all the sugar, and explain that John and Shelley are expecting me.
“Very well then,” she says, but she doesn’t stand up and neither do I.
She rummages for the remote down the side of her chair and clicks on a smallish and oldish telly sitting on a side table.
I have no idea what show it is that starts up, but it’s unmistakably British daytime telly: gentle and jaunty and familiar . . .
I open my eyes onto dark blue. The sun has gone and the moon is out, shining right in the wall of windows, casting a grid onto the floor. There’s a cushion behind my head and a blanket of crocheted spirals drawn right up to my neck. I push it off me and stand.
“Mrs. . . .” What the hell was her name?
The door is opening onto a lighted passageway. “Welcome back to the land of the living,” she says, standing in silhouette.
“What time is it?”
“Almost eleven. I was just about to wake you before I went up.” She lights a lamp, not the overhead but it’s enough to make me squint anyway.
I start to bluster about how sorry I am and try to tell her all over again about the jet lag, but she shushes me.
“I’m flattered. I’m glad I could give you what you needed. Sanctuary.” She reaches out a hand and rubs the doorframe as if she’s petting a dog. “While you were asleep, I wondered what else might help. How about a book?” I notice then that she’s got one in her hand.
“A self-help book?” I ask. “I’ve had a bad experience—”
“Heaven forbid!” she breaks in to say. “This is a novel.”
“I used to love novels,” I say, “ever since I could read. Stories saved— What I mean is, storybooks were such a refuge from . . . boredom when I was a kid.”
She holds the book out as if it’s a dog treat.
“Then I didn’t need saving,” I add. It’s so hard to explain when you’re trying not to say anything. “I had Kai.” I blink three times, willing my eyes not to fill.
She’s practically pushing the book into my hand.
“Anyway,” I tell her, “the problem now is that I’m an audiobook narrator by trade.
” She cocks her head, asking for more. “I start counting characters and planning what I’d do to differentiate them all.
If it hasn’t been narrated, I can’t resist trying to get in touch.
If it has, I can’t help listening and usually deciding I’d do better. So it’s not very restful, usually.”
“Ah, but this is a Christie,” she says, showing me the front cover.
It’s one of those gruesome seventies paperbacks and this is a particularly horrible example: half a blue-fleshed head with knitting needles stuck in it.
“If it’s been made into a talking book, it’ll be Jenny Agutter or Alan Rickman. Unimpeachable.”
I think her arm must be getting tired, holding a book out like that. It would be rude not to take it. “Thank you,” I say.
“It’s all about a young woman coming home,” she tells me. “It’s years since I read it, mind, but it’s a lovely story as far as I recall. Perfect for you while you’re house hunting.”
“Thank you,” I say again.
Then she shows me out, through the front door this time. I think it’s to display more of her beloved house. We go through a square hall with arches and half pillars, past a monster of a hatstand, and emerge into a marble-tiled vestibule open to the front garden.
“We’re sure to run into one another,” she says on the doorstep. “If it’s here you’re settling.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” I say, sincerely. If she was younger, I’d ask for her contacts and text her in the morning.
I stop, halfway down the drive, overcome with the urge to go back and ask Peggy March if I could stay the night in her house.
Succour is such a terrible word for a beautiful thing.
I even turn and look back at the open door to the vestibule, at the glass door into the hallway.
Then the light snaps off and I remember that she was on her way to bed, so I content myself with scribbling my phone number and email on a business card and easing the letterbox open as quietly as I can to let it drop inside.