A Half Forgotten Song (26 page)

“How long will it last, this . . .
brouillard
? How do you say it?” she asked.

“The fog?”

“Yes. The fog. I am not sure how you people stand it, without running mad. It’s like death, don’t you think? Like being dead.” Her voice was hushed, intense.

“It shouldn’t be much longer, Mrs. Aubrey. It ought not to have stayed this long already. Only in winter, normally, would it linger for a week.” Celeste smiled briefly.

“Mrs. Aubrey? Oh child, you know I am not that. I am Celeste, that is all.” She waved a hand in agitation. “And still he goes out to paint! What does he hope to paint? White upon white?” she muttered. She crossed to the window and stood looking out with her arms folded. “It is so dull,” she said, to nobody in particular.

The air inside the house was stale and overused, and Dimity thought it small wonder that the girls looked groggy and tired. She thought about trying to persuade them to come out for some air, but then Celeste went to the table and reached up to a high shelf above it, fetching down an atlas. “Come, Dimity, let me tell you about somewhere more alive. Had you heard of Morocco, before you met me?” she said.

“No, I had not,” Dimity confessed. She did not mind saying such things to Celeste. The woman had no scorn in her, made no judgments about Dimity’s education. She peered down at the complex drawing on the page. It made no sense to her at all. She searched for the familiar mouse-like shape of Britain, which she remembered from school; only once she’d found it could she gather where in the world this country of Celeste’s birth might lie. She looked sideways at the woman. It seemed unreal to her, that a person might come from so far away and to Blacknowle.

“How did you meet Mr. Aubrey?” Dimity asked.

“He came to Morocco. To Fez, where I grew up and was living with my family. It was magnificent once, a thriving place full of learning and trade. Now it is much declined, though the French have built better roads. But Charles loved it all the more for that, I think. The decay. The decline. The way the buildings are fading and . . . blurring into each other. He saw me one day in the market, as I went to the Old Town bazaar to order a new mattress. Does that not show how fate works? How powerful it is? That the very morning Charles should be sitting drawing outside the mattress-maker’s shop, a workman should accidentally spill paint all over my mother’s bed? Hmm? It was destined. He came to Morocco to find himself, and instead he found me.”

“Yes,” said Dimity. Was it destiny, then, that there should be watercress growing behind Littlecombe, and that Dimity should go there to pick it, and that a great man like Charles Aubrey should choose to rent this very house, and come here, of all the places in the world? Here, to where Dimity was. To where she had always been, waiting. With a shiver, she hung the words
fate
and
destiny
onto this, her own life, her own meeting with him. They seemed to fit, and this startled her.

Celeste sighed and ran her fingers over the map of Morocco with its vast empty spaces of desert and the twin ridges of mountains curving through it in the south. Here she tapped her nail.

“Toubkal,” she said. “The tallest mountain. My mother grew up in its shadow, in the shelter it gave. Her village was built into the rocks at its feet, where the wind through the pine trees was like it breathing. There is no better way to always know your way home than to live beside a mountain, she says. It has been too long since I went back to her; back to Fez. How I should love to see them again!” Celeste put her hand flat on the page, and shut her eyes for a second, as though feeling the heartbeat of her home through the paper. Dimity wondered if she would feel this pull for home if she ever traveled away from Blacknowle. If she would come to love it, once she was far from it; as though distance might give it a shine, a glow it wholly lacked now. The thought that she might never travel away from Blacknowle sat inside her and took something from her, a little bit every day, like a parasite. “It has been too long. When I think of it, of how beautiful it is, it seems strange to me that we choose to be here.” Celeste glanced around at the kitchen’s four walls. “In Blacknowle,” she said, her voice laden with ennui. Dimity felt a sudden nudge of disquiet, a little warning bell in the back of her mind.

Just then, the door opened and Charles appeared with a swirl of mist. Droplets of moisture hung from his hair and his clothes, but he was smiling.

“Ladies. How are we all?” he said cheerily.

“Bored and bad-tempered,” said Delphine, and though she said it lightly, Dimity heard a warning for him in the words. Charles glanced from his daughter to Celeste, and registered her flat expression.

“Well, perhaps this will help.” He held aloft a white envelope. “I ran into the postman in the village. A letter for us from France.”

“Oh! We are not quite forgotten, then?” cried Celeste, snatching it from him.

“Who’s it from? What does it say?” demanded Élodie, as her mother tore open the envelope.

“Hush, child, and let me read.” Celeste frowned at the paper, standing by the window for better light. “It is from Paul and Emilia . . . they are in Paris,” she said, eyes rapidly scanning the page. “They have taken a large apartment on the Seine, and they invite us to go and visit with them!” She looked at Charles, her face lighting up; Dimity felt all the air dribble out of her lungs.

“Paris!” Élodie gasped in excitement.

“It is only two weeks until school starts . . .” Charles pointed out, taking the letter from Celeste.

“Oh, do let’s go, though. It’ll be so much fun,” said Delphine, taking her father’s hand and squeezing it.

Dimity stared at her in horror. “But . . . the mist will clear soon, I know it . . .” she said. Nobody seemed to hear her.

“Well?” Celeste said to Charles, holding her clasped hands up to her mouth, her eyes wide and avid. He smiled at her and shrugged a shoulder.

“Paris it is, then,” he said. The girls whooped with delight, and Celeste threw her arms around Charles’s neck, kissing him. Dimity stood rooted to the spot, reeling with shock. She felt like she was drowning and nobody could see. She knew instinctively that this time she would not be included.

“But . . .” she said again, the word lost beneath the racket of their excitement.

T
wo days later the mist vanished; gone when the sun rose. Dimity climbed the cliff path and stared far out to sea, feeling her eyes stretch after so many days with nothing to see that was farther away than her fingertips. The colors were garish, joyful—the citrine sunshine, the blue overhead, the green and gold of the land with the gorse in full bloom; all mirrored and shifting on the sea. But it was too late, they had already gone. Littlecombe was empty, and Dimity was sure she could feel her heart breaking. But she didn’t cry. She wanted to—her spirits were as heavy as wet sand—but when she tried, when she surrendered, nothing came. There was something else, behind the agony of abandonment. There was the injustice of a broken promise, and bitter resentment of their offhand cruelty. There was anger, then, to keep her eyes dry, because the life she had been left to was that much worse for them having shown her how different it could be. The sun shone brightly, but for Dimity, winter had come early.

Z
ach spent two quiet days collating the notes he’d made since arriving in Blacknowle, and drawing links between some of the things he’d already known and things he had since learned from Dimity. There were a good number of correlating facts, but also a good few for which there seemed to be no evidence but her say-so. Like her love affair with Charles Aubrey, for one thing. If she had been as big a part of his life as she claimed, why was there no reference to the affair in any of Charles’s correspondence? How could she know nothing about the fate of his family, and why he’d suddenly decided to go to war? How could she have no idea who Dennis had been, if she had been so close to Charles that he had planned to leave his family for her? Aubrey had been a genius for capturing character and expression, and yet with Dennis he had captured neither. Had it been deliberate? Perhaps he hadn’t liked this Dennis, or for some reason hadn’t wanted to record his expression. Perhaps even geniuses had off days, and Aubrey had drawn three such similar portraits because he
knew
he’d failed to pin it down. And then again, perhaps the drawings weren’t by Aubrey at all.

Zach pictured Dimity Hatcher in her grubby red mittens, with her changing moods and her odd habits and blood under her nails from a bullock’s heart. The way she’d glanced up at the ceiling when they both heard the sounds of movement. Not a glance caused by habit, but one of surprise, excitement. Almost one of fear. He thought of Hannah, unwilling to talk about it and then stating that there was nobody else living upstairs at The Watch.
Nobody living.
What, then? Somebody visiting? Somebody dead?
Things that go bump in the night?
Zach was loath to upset Dimity again by asking questions she had already refused to answer, but at the same time his need for answers was gnawing away at the back of his mind. A niggle he found hard to ignore. He thought of the way she’d flushed, the way her eyes had darted about nervously when he’d shown her pictures of Dennis. He thought of all the long hours he’d spent staring at Delphine’s portrait in his own gallery in Bath; of all the time he’d spent dreaming about her, trying to conjure her fate out of the hidden past. And here was Dimity Hatcher, who had known her, and been her friend, who had wept at the memory of her fate. Dimity Hatcher, to whom he’d sworn he would ask no more questions about Charles Aubrey’s elder daughter.

With a sigh, Zach gave up on his notes and queries for a while, shut his workbook, and strode purposefully out to his car. It had been two days since he’d seen Hannah, but with no mobile phone signal, no texts or calls, it felt like longer. He’d been hoping she might come to the pub to find him, but she hadn’t. He went into Wareham first, to the small supermarket there, and then down to the farm, where he parked on the concrete yard by the house. There was no answer to his knock on Hannah’s door, so Zach carried on down to the beach.

Hannah was standing far out at the end of the submerged rock spur with her arms folded, her jeans rolled up to the knee and a loose blue shirt belling out behind her, catching the wind like a sail. The breeze was strong, whipping the surface of the sea into a thousand tiny crests, spinning salt into the air. Zach called out to her, but with the wind in her ears she didn’t hear him. He put down the shopping bags he was holding and sat on a rock to take off his shoes and socks, watching her all the while. He wanted to draw the resolute line of her spine, the way she was almost lost against the seascape, a single figure surrounded by agitated water that seemed to lie in wait—for her to stumble, for her to miss her footing. She looked at the same time immovable and in grave peril. He thought about whom this drawing would be for, and knew at once that it would be purely for himself; to preserve the simple joy of seeing her. The very same reason that Aubrey drew his women, Zach thought, though he smiled to think how Hannah might react to being called “his woman.” He took a few tentative steps onto the rock shelf, finding it hard to trust the path when he could not see it. He spread his arms out in case he tripped; felt the wind rush around his fingers.

“Hannah!” he called again, but either she still couldn’t hear or was so lost in thought that she didn’t. Zach waded close behind her, cursing as he stubbed his toe on a small, hidden step. Still she gazed out to sea, and for a second Zach stopped and did the same. He wondered if it was still Toby that she was looking for, that she was waiting for. Everything in her stance said she would wait as long as she had to, and Zach wanted to grab her, spin her around to face him and break off the vigil. A flash of light caught his eye. There was a small boat, a very typical fishing boat, making slow progress east to west about a hundred and fifty meters offshore. Zach had barely even noticed it, but now he saw that its progress was particularly slow, and that a figure on board appeared to be studying the shore every bit as intently as Hannah was studying the sea. The flash of light came again—the sun catching fleetingly on glass. Binoculars?

“I think that fisherman fancies you,” he said, close to Hannah’s ear. She jumped and spun around to him with a gasp, then slapped him across one cheek, not hard but not entirely playfully, either.

“Damn it, Zach! Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

“I did call out to you—several times.”

“Well, obviously I didn’t hear you,” she said, her face softening.

“Sorry,” said Zach. He ran his fingers down her forearm, and took her hand.

Hannah looked away again, following the small boat that was finally motoring out of sight around the coast. Had she been watching the boat, then, and not waiting for Toby at all? Zach squinted at it, and saw a flash of pale purple as somebody moved across the deck. The color was familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.

“Do you know that boat? The people on it, I mean?” he asked. Hannah looked away from it quickly, flicked her eyes up at him.

“No,” she said curtly. “Not at all.” She pulled her hand away from his, ostensibly to push her hair out of her face and tuck it behind her ear.

“I’ve brought a picnic. Bought a grill and everything. Are you hungry?”

“Starving,” she said with a smile. Zach held out his arm, and was glad when she looped hers through it as they walked back towards the beach.

They set up the little foil grill he’d bought on some flat rocks up the beach, beyond the high-tide line of shells and cuttlefish bones. It gave off the faint reek of paraffin as Zach lit it, and Hannah shook her head.

“Shame on me,” she said.

“What for?”

“I could have built us a proper cook fire. There’s even a grate and long-handled tools up in one of the barns.”

“Well, I’ll tend to this one, you build a campfire over there. For later.”

“Later?”

“This little thing won’t keep us warm once the sun goes down,” said Zach.