Chapter 12
“Uff,” Shelley says as we turn into the drive. “You need to water the garden.”
It was a dry spring and we’re having a dry summer and, now that I look closely, the front garden—my front garden as of noon today—is indeed a bit wilted here and there. The trees are okay but the grass is yellowing and the bushes—I need to learn their names—are drooping.
“At least the weeds are dying,” I say, pointing at the gravel drive.
“They’ll set seed as a last gasp,” Shelley says. “And they’re harder to pull out of baked ground.”
If it was anyone else, I’d say she was jealous of my beautiful house. And Saint Helen’s is still very beautiful, even rising up out of this neglect. But Shelley isn’t subtle enough to be so indirect. If she was jealous, she’d call me a lucky pig and nip my arm.
“I’m going to miss you,” I tell her. “All three of you. You and the boys.”
We both burst out laughing because I will miss John, but we’ve regressed over the weeks of trying to live together.
After we had that heart-to-heart about the caravan and after he stopped being so worried about me, he started laying into me like the old days.
And when I stopped being so worried about myself, I gave it back as good as I got.
I realised, you see, that he wanted me back here because he needs me, like I need him.
We survived the same childhood, John and me.
He was braver, growing up, staying put, letting all the memories fade.
I ran away from them, into my books, into my marriage, across all those time zones.
Now I’m back, he doesn’t need to be so brave all on his own.
Now he’s near me, I can face it without it destroying me.
I still get the odd wave of—I’ve decided to call it psychic vertigo—when I can’t remember telling my family what they seem to know, or I can’t put my finger on what they tell me I’m experiencing.
Twice the world went flat and fluttery again.
Once was looking out the window at the yard in the dark, and once was talking to Chloe about David, wondering why she wasn’t hassling to hang out with him.
But I had already solved that little puzzle: It’s because I’m back where everything happened to me. The plot thins.
I haven’t thought I knew any strangers for a while.
And it was only ever Aileen I couldn’t remember.
What else? I haven’t misheard anything. The only thing that’s not improving is the dreams: night after night of furious, chaotic nightmares—strangers who know me, friends who look past me, empty houses, endless foxes, and splinters and iron filings under my nails till my fingers bleed.
The dreams are all so similar that I wake in the small hours thinking I should surely be able to crack their code, but by the morning they’re no more than a shudder when I look in the mirror to brush my teeth—Now shave—or a sudden breathlessness if I’m outside and a breeze sends the clouds scudding fast enough across the sky that the light keeps changing—The North Wind and the Sun.
That and the endless news every morning that no matter how hard I’ve been searching for Kai all night, I’m never going to find him.
One bright spot is waking up knowing I can look for Peggy.
Her bit of my dreams is the only thing that’s no mystery.
It’s so clear it makes me cringe. That thing she keeps trying to give me is a business card—a business card, for God’s sake!
—like I was generous and kind enough to drop through her letterbox.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I should have done more. I’ll find you. I promis—”
“Speak of the devil,” Shelley says, looking in her rearview mirror.
“What?”
“That’s John. I hope your new neighbours know the Clampetts are moving in.”
Of course John offered to move all my borrowed belongings.
And of course, when it was too late to make other arrangements, he realised that the big van was booked, so here he comes in the pickup truck with bedposts and chair legs sticking up and a bandana tied to the bit of the couch that’s hanging over the back bumper.
I wave at him and start windmilling my arms to tell him where to turn and where to reverse to, to get in the front door with the least lugging.
He shakes his head as he passes me and, with one arm hanging out of the side window, he reverses up to the steps in one go, leaving just enough room to get past the pillars and drop the tailgate.
I rummage in my bag for the big key I picked up at the estate agent in Bridge of Allan as the clock struck twelve—Farmer George himself, as it goes. He didn’t remember me today, which is just as well after I had bugged him for places to rent and then never followed up.
I expected David to be there in BofA, if I’m honest. But I suppose, given that he handled the whole thing for me and has never once mentioned money, I can’t complain about the service.
I can’t complain about any of the services: not David either comping the lot or paring his rates to the bone and all set to wait a while before he bills me; not Chloe finding the house in the first place but not snapping it up for herself; certainly not John and Shelley taking the time to help me move in.
“Have I told you how grateful I am?” I say to John’s bent head as he’s untying the binder twine holding the tailgate shut. Clampetts is not an overstatement.
“Say it with pies,” says John. “I’ll have a hot steak slice and a cream horn for after.”
“I don’t know the bakers yet,” I tell him. “But you’re on.”
Then I can’t concentrate on him anymore because I have opened the front door and am stepping inside my new home. The rest of the keys are laid out on a shallow table in the vestibule, just like Farmer George said they would be. I open the inner doors and throw them wide.
Inside, it’s cold and damp despite the two months of dry summer and it smells as if there have been mice making the most of getting the place to themselves.
But the light is pouring down from the top of the stairwell and the wood still looks burnished to glowing under the lightest film of dust that blows away at a breath.
And it’s so, so, so solid. Nothing fluttering here.
“Where do you want the couch?” says John. He’s got a hold of one end and he’s dragging it out of the pickup, the legs screeching on the metal.
“Leave it a minute,” I say. “Come in and look round.”
“I’ve seen it,” he tells me, then he bites his lip.
“When?” I ask him. “Did you clear it? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Numpty,” John says. “I picked up a piano years back from the old dear that used to live here then. I went for a nose about.”
“You’re such an arsehole,” Shelley tells him, in that affectionate way of hers. “Why couldn’t you keep your gob shut for once and look round Lindsay’s new place instead of having to come out on top every time?”
“Sorry, Lindsay,” John says, making my mouth fall open. “I didn’t see everywhere. Give me the tour before we start unpacking, eh?”
“Hallebloodylujah,” says Shelley, and does that thing with her hands as if she’s writing a headline. “Man in Forties Shows Signs of Growing Up.”
“Family Stunned,” I add, matching the gesture.
“Two Women Pushing Forty in Hospital After Lifting Couch on Their Own,” says John. I let him have the win. Apart from anything else, that was funny.
Then I show them round, not even trying to stop myself getting insufferable about the space and the number of rooms, the size of the windows, the original keys for the locks of all the doors, the four-oven Aga I’ll never be able to afford to run on the oil it takes, the nifty cupboards in the butler’s pantry that I haven’t got enough china to fill, the lovely bathroom with the dark wood surround to the bath.
“That was in a book,” Shelley says. “A mahogany bit round the bath. Some woman had a flashback.”
“I’m reading that book!” I say. “Or trying to, till I packed it by mistake.” I’ll make sure and tell Chloe there’s a downside to a plain brown wrapper after all.
“You do know the only way that wood’s still in good nick after a hundred years, don’t you?” says John. We wait. “No shower. Is there a shower room somewhere else?”
“Not yet,” I say, “and I haven’t got a penny left to put one in. I’m going to have dull, flat hair for a while, unless I join a gym and shower there. And I can’t afford the membership fees.”
“Rather you than me,” John says. “Is there decent Wi-Fi?”
“No, and I’m going to have to put the start-up fees on my credit card and work like a dog till I’ve paid it off.”
“Work where?” says Shelley.
“Ah,” I say. “The final stop on the tour. Come into my dead room, said the . . . I don’t know who would say that.”
“Zombie to the blonde,” John offers.
Shelley shakes her head at him and rolls her eyes at me. “Don’t scrape up Lindsay’s new floors, dragging your knuckles on them.”
“I’m okay for looking at a cubbyhole, actually,” he says as we’re recrossing the main hallway.
“I’ll crack on here.” I think he has exhausted both his interest in houses and his capacity to fake it, but he’s done pretty well, and neither of us is so desperate to lug furniture that we’re going to stop him.
“Won’t it creep you out working hidden away here in a big empty house?” Shelley says as she goes ahead of me up the crooked staircase. The door at the bottom was locked and so is the one at the top but the key is there and turns easily. “Especially if you’re going to block up the window, right?”
“Of course not,” I say, but even as the words are leaving my mouth, it hits me.
I have made a huge, stupid mistake and I genuinely had no idea.