Deep Water, Thin Ice (19 page)

‘Are you trying to tell me you want to finish it?’

‘No,’ she said sulkily. ‘Of course not. Oh hell, someone’s just come into the gallery. Speak to you soon.’

Helen rang off abruptly and Theo looked down at his mobile with amusement. How ironic that the woman he desperately wanted to throw herself at him was reserved and cautious and studiously platonic, while the woman he would undoubtedly give up as soon as circumstances required it – or when he got bored, whichever came sooner – was as devoted as a puppy. Sarah’s green dress had caused Helen a momentary pause - he’d thought, briefly, that maybe he’d pushed his luck too far too soon – but she’d come round under his devoted attention and he thought the evening had been a great success. When he’d left she’d certainly been looking forward to their next meeting.

But there had been further problems, a few days later, when Theo went into the gallery to buy Alex’s present. Helen had heard the gossip that he was seeing Alex Munroe, that it was more than just a hand with a bit of DIY, that they’d been seen
out
together. When he asked for the bird carving, Helen guessed who it was for and promptly lost her temper.

‘So it’s true then? You’re buying it for that singer woman aren’t you? You’re two-timing me with her?
I’ve
seen her standing staring at that thing. You’re a bastard, you know that?’

‘Oh come on Helen. I can’t believe you said that.’

‘It’s no good denying it. I know you’re seeing her.’

‘I wasn’t going to deny it. It’s true.’

Helen flashed him a poisonous look as she picked up the carving from the window and stalked back to the glass counter with it to wrap.

‘Helen,’ he said softly. ‘You’re taking this all the wrong way. I thought you’d be smarter than that.’ He went on to stress how platonic his relationship with Alex was - ‘Just like a brother and sister; we are related in a way,’ - and how minor it was in comparison with the steamy one he shared with her.

She pretended to ignore him while she wrapped the carving but she kept glancing up at him, her eyes showing how desperate she was to believe him.

‘I’d bet she’d be really frigid compared to you,’ he went on. ‘But honestly I’m not that interested to find out.’

‘Really?’ Helen looked at him big-eyed, like a child being offered a trip out.

‘Really. Don’t you believe me?’

She pulled a face and stared into his eyes.

‘Maybe.’

She’d given in. While he offered her his credit card, they arranged their next date. And now she was miserable because it had had to be called off. Theo shook his head; she was such a fool. But she was a welcome and amusing distraction from his more pressing concerns. He’d already replaced his mother’s green dress – ‘I’d better keep it safe with me so Bob doesn’t see it,’ he’d told Helen - and picked out another one for their next meeting. It would be safe tucked away in his bedroom until the next opportunity presented itself.

The sky over the far hill was lightening, the increasing intensity of the ochrous glow suggesting the rising sun beyond. A white vaporous mist hung wispily over the River Kella as Alex reached the mudflats and hesitated. It was nearly half past seven and the tide had already receded, exposing the rugged columns of stepping stones.  Her arrival disturbed the oystercatchers and they shuffled off and then flew further up river, their piping calls of protest echoing back through the mist to her. A heron reluctantly rose into the air and flapped languidly away. It was the twenty-sixth of October, exactly one year since Simon had died, and Alex resolutely picked her way across the stones on her way to bury his ashes.

‘How long did it take you to get over Bill’s death?’ she’d asked Liz Franklin once.

‘Get
over
it?’ Liz pulled a face, a rare puckering of her brow. ‘I’m not sure I ever have dear. You just get used to it. But I think the first year is the worst. You know, getting through all those ‘first times’ when you have to do something without him, and then there’s Christmas of course and his birthday and your wedding anniversary. So many minefields to negotiate. But when you’ve done it all once you know you can get through it all again.’ She nodded her head and her double chin shook. ‘Yes, once you pass the year I think it starts to get easier.’ She smiled then and added kindly: ‘I’m sure it will for you too.’

A dense, pressing dread had insidiously crept up on Alex as the anniversary of Simon’s death approached. Torn between marking the occasion in some way and wanting to escape it, the idea of using it to finally bury Simon’s ashes had come to her just a few days before, during one wet and windy night. In the early hours of the morning she’d been woken, she thought, by the sound of a voice. In the leaden dullness between sleep and wakefulness it had sounded like someone saying a name though she couldn’t make out whose. She’d sat up jerkily and peered into the darkness around her.

‘Simon?’ she managed to ask eventually. ‘Simon? What do you want? Tell me darling, what do you want?’

And there’d been silence; just the whistling of the wind outside and the rain hammering on the window, and a strange lingering resonance of her pathetic voice, high and unnatural. She suspected herself. Her wishes and confusion were breeding this. Deep within her subconscious, when her guard was down, she was conjuring him up. It was as her mother and Erica had so often suggested: her imagination ran wild. Perhaps everything she’d felt and thought she’d seen – all the coldness, the movements, the unexplained noises – could all be explained by her own muddled desire and guilt.

She lay awake, trying to make sense of it all and failing. But as the rain stopped and the first glow of dawn lit her bedroom, it became clear, once and for all, that she needed to finally lay Simon to rest, both in the ground and hopefully in her mind. If she didn’t, she was practically inviting him to haunt her forever.

So now, with Simon’s casket firmly stowed in a rucksack on her back, she walked the riverside path on the far bank of the river, laboured up the final rise, on and up to the lonely spot on the windswept cliffs where the old chapel bore the brunt of the channel storms. Breathless and hot by the time she arrived, she paused and looked out at the views, hazy and mysterious in the early morning mist.

‘I heard someone in the village suggest that the cliff’s eroding up at Dolphin Point,’ she’d said casually to Theo. ‘Does that mean the chapel’s going to fall into the sea?’

He’d laughed. ‘Eventually maybe, but not for centuries I shouldn’t think. One stone falls every ten years and everyone panics about erosion. They make me laugh. Why?’

She shrugged. ‘I just wondered,’ she said, and dismissed Mick’s comment from her head. She wasn’t going to tell anyone what she was going to do, not even Theo who had put the idea in her mind in the first place. Certainly not Erica. Having felt so dissociated from the funeral service in London, this time she wanted to be alone to say her goodbyes.

She slipped the rucksack to the ground and took out a trowel. Having carefully monitored the tides for several days, she’d been across the two previous mornings in order to find a suitable spot and to prepare the ground. In a place where the earth was a little softer, she’d loosened it and then covered it with a heavy stone. Now she heaved the stone away and cleared a hole deep enough to bury the casket. She glanced at her watch, retrieved the casket from the bag and carefully laid it in the ground, piling earth and stones back on top and treading it firm. Then she dragged the stone across the top again and stood back, catching her breath.

‘Rest in peace darling,’ she murmured.

With the sun clearing the hilltop in a burst of orange light, she clasped her hands in front of her and haltingly sang Ireland’s ‘Nunc Dimittis’, tears silently coursing down her cheeks.

Then she gathered her things and hurried back to the stepping stones before the water rose too high for her to cross back.

*

‘If you keep bringing her things to eat she’ll get fat. She’s a greedy pig.’

Mick shook his head despairingly as he watched Susie gently take the large bone-shaped treat from Alex’s hand and trot off behind the carriage with it.

‘She doesn’t have time to get fat, running round after you. Anyway, you don’t mean it. You spoil her to death yourself.’

‘No, I don’t overfeed her. That’s not a kindness.’ Mick tried to sound stern but failed and was frustrated with himself.  His feeble efforts at keeping Alex away hadn’t lasted long and they hadn’t worked. He’d even apologised – sort of – for losing his temper about her questions regarding Dolphin Point and had caught himself trying to make it up to her. It was crazy. He felt more alive than he’d done for years and ten times more vulnerable. But it was a friendship which had no future and if he had any sense, he’d tell her to stay away. He reluctantly concluded that he clearly didn’t have any sense.

The days were getting progressively shorter as November moved on and the reserve buzzed with activity. The month had begun with a couple of days of cold and frost and then the weather had turned mild and damp. Birds were arriving daily from further north, either stopping to feed on their way south, or to stay for the winter to take advantage of the shelter, mild weather and the food. He’d seen gadwall and a couple of tufted ducks; some whimbrel had passed through on their way to Africa and a few green shank had arrived; that morning a grey wagtail had been bobbing its way along the muddy edges of the water.

Sitting side by side in the hide a little later on, Alex saw a shoveler on the open water, upending itself to feed. She silently pointed it out to him at the same time as wresting the binoculars from his grasp. He raised his eyebrows, amused. She’d learnt a lot about birds recently, even going so far as to buy herself a book about them. She’d also found a way to get to the Grenloe basin without going through the village, cutting across and down the parkland on its northern edge and then coming down into the wooded land which led through to the reed beds and the clearing. The route apparently included climbing fences and a chained wooden gate. The first time she appeared in the reserve through the back of the reed beds, she’d grinned at him and brandished an ordnance survey map triumphantly. ‘Seems you’ve learnt something then,’ he’d said dryly. ‘Shame you didn’t think of doing that in the first place.

He watched her now as she peered out towards the water.

‘These binoculars are scratched,’ she muttered. ‘They’re useless.’

He sometimes wondered what went on in her mind. At times her speech was animated, her face and hands remarkably expressive; on other days she was dull and introspective. And her trips to the reserve were similarly erratic. She’d come on successive days and then not come for a week. She reminded him of a nervous bird, wanting to fly in to feed, but too wary to settle for long.

Increasingly they had started to have serious conversations over coffee. They’d discuss music or politics or arts and crafts. They agreed, disagreed and argued, sometimes heatedly. For a professional, independent woman, it surprised him at times that Alex could be so gullible and trusting of what she read in the papers. Her straight-backed, head-high demeanour appeared to mask a deeper-seated self-doubt. But she was intelligent, articulate and well-read. It had been a long time since he’d been able to talk to anyone in this way and he found he was greedy for it.

‘You’re very well informed for someone who shuts himself away from the world,’ she said once after a passionate debate on the environment and global warming.

‘I can read. I’ve even got a radio.’

‘But I didn’t think you’d even want to know.’

‘I could say the same thing about you.’

She let it drop. He’d met few women – or men come to that – who could restrain their curiosity and not pry. And she still never mentioned Theo and neither did he, though he sometimes felt the man’s invisible presence hung around them like a dark spectre, conjured up by their pointed evasion. But it was none of his business and never would be.

‘If you keep buying dog treats at the shop,’ he muttered now, staring through the draughty windows of the hide, ‘that nosey Lyn Causey who runs The Stores’ll get suspicious about what you’re doing with them.’

‘I don’t buy them there,’ she replied, barely moving her lips. ‘I get them in Southwell, in a big pack. It’s cheaper anyway.’

‘You’re always saying that money isn’t an issue.’

‘It’s not but there’s no reason to squander it. I buy plenty of other things in The Stores. In any case it did occur…even to me…’ She flicked him a scathing glance. ‘…that I didn’t want to have to explain who I was getting the treats for.’

‘Sh, there’s a bearded tit…on that reed over there.’ He reached across to take the old binoculars from her hands.

‘They’re useless,’ she repeated. ‘You should get some new ones.’

‘
I
can see through them.
There’s no reason to squander money
,’ he fluted in a poor imitation of her intonation. He peered through the glasses. ‘Female.’

She frowned and stared towards the bird. ‘How can you tell?’

*

Alex pulled the surveyor’s report out of the envelope and blanched as she read it. She was already aware of some of the issues it raised like the missing tiles from the roof and the leaking gutters, but it brought up a whole catalogue of other problems to address, both major and minor. ‘You shouldn’t rush into redoing everything. I mean you probably won’t be there long enough to make it worthwhile,’ Erica had predictably said during their phone conversation that night, and Alex wondered why she’d told her sister anyway. Theo had been, equally predictably, more upbeat about it. ‘You pay the surveyor to find the problems or potential ones. It doesn’t mean that everything has to be done immediately. You should go through it and prioritise.’ He’d flashed his infectious grin at her. ‘Like you said, the Hall isn’t about to fall down.’ More seriously he added: ‘I know a decent builder who could help out if you want.’