In a Good Light (26 page)

As soon as I reached the Old Schoolhouse I rang Penny's number. The phone was picked up almost immediately and I heard a sharp intake of breath before it was put down again. It was the sort of sound you might make if you had inadvertently done something you weren't supposed to: like pick up a phone when you were supposed to be somewhere else. I redialled immediately, but this time there was no reply. While I was still standing in the hall, staring at the phone, I remembered something Penny had said months ago. She was looking forward to the beginning of July because the Raving Tory and the Old Hag were going to Greece to celebrate twenty years of marital torment, so she would have the house to herself, day and night.

I realised at last what a smarter, sharper person would have suspected straight away: there was no boat trip. Christian and Penny were staying in her empty house.
Living together as man and wife
, as Dad would have put it. Once I had worked this out I hardly needed any more confirmation, but as I was at a loose end, I decided to take Mum's bike and ride straight over to Penny's anyway.

The journey was a lot longer than it had seemed by car, and I had to keep stopping to read the A-Z, and reattach the chain, which had an annoying habit of jerking free
whenever I changed gear. It really was the crappiest bike imaginable, with its rusted brakes and withered saddle, and I marvelled yet again at my mother's patient acceptance of dross. By the time I was halfway there, and committed to continuing, I was seriously regretting my decision, and wishing I'd opted instead for my usual afternoon nap.

Another complication occurred to me as I swung into the broad avenue leading to Penny's house. Suppose they were just arriving or leaving as I drew up? I had no wish to be caught spying, and didn't want to confront them. Something told me that wouldn't be civilised behaviour. I intended to deploy my hard-won knowledge with more finesse. These anxieties proved groundless, because as I approached the house neither Christian nor Penny appeared, but an upstairs window had been left open, and the yellow Mini stood on the horseshoe-shaped drive, proclaiming their occupancy like a royal pennant. With my object achieved there was nothing for it but to turn around and head for home, which I did with some regret. It was a hot July afternoon, and in other circumstances I would have been able to knock at the door and cadge some refreshment. That carefully eked out Coke from Luigi's had worn off long ago, and thanks to those Six Wives of Henry VIII guest soaps I had no money for another.

I rode home, dry-mouthed, the warm wind in my face, my right ankle skinned raw from the slipping bicycle chain, strangely uncomforted by having had my suspicions confirmed.

Back at the Old Schoolhouse Mum was on the telephone, and in a state of agitation. She wagged her hand to tell me to wait. ‘She's just walked in. I'll ask her now,' she said into the receiver, and hung up with a crash. ‘Grandpa's gone
walkabout,' she explained breathlessly. ‘I've only just come in to find him missing. I went to see if I could try and track him down on the bicycle but it's been stolen . . .' She stopped, seeing my guilty expression.

‘Sorry,' I said, pointing out of the window to the drive where the bike lay, its front wheel still spinning. ‘I just borrowed it. I didn't realise you'd be needing it.'

Mum blinked with astonishment. ‘You? Whatever for?' My slothfulness was the cause of much nagging and sarcasm at home, a fact I decided to use to my own advantage.

‘You're always telling me I need to get up and about more, and do some exercise,' I improvised. ‘So I did. I would have asked, if you'd been here.'

Mum looked sceptical. ‘Well, never mind that now. Was Grandpa still here when you left?'

‘I don't know. I didn't look.'

‘Oh, hell's teeth. He could have been gone hours.'

‘The TV was on,' I remembered. I'd heard it in the background when I went to phone Penny.

‘That doesn't mean anything. He wouldn't think to turn it off.' She was already dragging on her sandals. ‘I'll ride around the lanes. Since you're so keen on exercise all of a sudden, you can run up to the paper shop and the pub – actually, you'd better not go in the pub – and ask if they've seen him. Your dad's on his way home. I'll meet you back here in half an hour.'

I helped myself to a glass of water and set off on foot as instructed. As I emerged from the paper shop I spotted Dad driving past the Fox and Pheasant, a serene and unrepentant Grandpa beside him, and was able to flag them down for a lift home. Dad had found Grandpa sitting on a bench in the churchyard, still in his pyjamas, talking to one of the church
wardens. All the way home he kept rattling his tic-tacs and saying, ‘Are we nearly there?' just like a child on a long journey.

‘What's the matter with grandpa?' I asked mum, later, when we were alone. As well as wandering off in his pyjamas, he occasionally went to bed in his clothes, accused Mum of stealing his false teeth, fished rubbish out of the wastepaper baskets and hid it in his room, and called me Kitty, which was Grandma Percy's name.

‘He's got dementia, I'm afraid,' she replied. ‘It's his age.'

She was sitting at the kitchen table writing the days of the week and other memory aids –
MORNING, AFTERNOON, NIGHT-TIME, TEETH, PILLS
– on large pieces of card to be posted in prominent places around the house. She shook her head.

‘Will he get better?' I asked, not liking the sound of it. ‘If he had some medicine or something?'

She shook her head. ‘No. That's the trouble with getting old.' She automatically rubbed her knee, which was stiff and sore after that emergency bike ride. ‘Things get worse rather than better. I'd advise you to stay young.' And she smiled to reassure me that it was her attempt at a joke. And I smiled back to let her know I appreciated the effort. At the same time I felt the slight chill I always did whenever anyone alluded to the distant future. ‘When you have children of your own . . .' ‘Wait till you have to pay the bills . . .' ‘When you're working for a living . . .' These words never failed to provoke an angry buzzing deep in the channels of my ears: to imagine myself old was just as ludicrous and impossible as imagining my parents young.

My confidence in my powers of detection was momentarily shaken a couple of days later by the arrival of
a postcard from Norfolk. It showed a picture of river cruisers moored on a stretch of unconvincingly turquoise water, and was postmarked Thetford.

Hi Folks
, it said, in Christian's unmistakably slanting handwriting.
Having a great week. Weather's brill. No disasters so far. Penny sends love. See you soon. Chris.

There was something in the blandness of this message, and its lack of detail, that persuaded me not to take it at face value, and I decided to have some fun at Christian's expense when he returned. Not to get him into trouble, of course, but just so he would know I was Not A Fool.

There were plenty of books about Norfolk in the travel section of the Central Library: local history; camping and caravanning guides;
A Wildfowler's Norfolk; An Artist's Norfolk
, and pretty soon I had found out everything I needed to know. In fact the whole experience made me realise what an amazing place the library was, and what a treasure house it would be, if only I was the sort of person who liked reading books. But I had my own stern librarian in the shape of Penny, who was now trying to steer me through the works of Thomas Hardy – gloomy tales of catastrophic coincidences and thwarted potential that made me vow never to set foot in Dorset.

‘You're not very brown,' Mum said, on the prodigal's return. ‘I wouldn't have thought there'd be much shade on a boat. Wasn't it sunny?'

I couldn't help smirking. Christian's skin had the pallor of someone who has spent a week under the duvet. ‘Yes, it was sunny,' said Christian smoothly. ‘But I didn't lie around sunbathing.'

‘Very sensible,' said Dad, who was fair-skinned.

We were eating dinner together, just the family. Penny, though invited, had declined. My guess was she was putting the house back in order before her parents came home. As it was a special occasion Mum had exerted herself in the kitchen and produced a roast. A roast what, we couldn't be sure. We were sitting outside enjoying the evening sun, which came glancing over the tops of the beech trees. Since I'd cleaned up the old table for the lemonade experiment we often ate outdoors. Dad was fending off wasps with a rolled napkin.

‘Did you see Berney Arms Mill?' I asked innocently. ‘It's the biggest in Norfolk.'

Christian looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘How would you know? You've never been there.'

‘It's famous,' I insisted. ‘Didn't you see it?'

‘Where are you going?' Grandpa Percy asked.

‘Nowhere,' Christian replied, accepting the diversion gratefully. ‘I've just come back.'

There was a thwack as Dad dispatched another wasp. ‘We must have a nest,' he said. ‘I must do something about it.'

‘What about the bridge at Potter Heigham?' I asked. ‘That's supposed to be worth a trip.'

Christian shot me a look of deep disgust.

‘You're very well informed,' said Mum. ‘Is this something you're doing at school?'

‘Where's he going?' Grandpa asked Dad.

‘Nowhere. He's just come back from Norfolk.'

‘Norfolk!' The word seemed to penetrate the fog of confusion in Grandpa's brain, because he became suddenly animated. ‘We used to go mackerel fishing at Great Yarmouth,' he said. ‘Beautiful sandy beach. We had our own boat. Did you see the boats?'

‘Or the thirteenth-century toll house?' I asked.

Christian stood up and picked up his plate. ‘Do you mind if I finish this indoors? These wasps are driving me mad.' And he glared at me to let me know he considered me an equivalent pest.

It was only much later, when Christian realised his secret was safe, and that my performance at dinner had been for my amusement alone, that he came clean. He and Penny had indeed spent the week at her place, and for the first few days had been afraid to leave the house in case they were spotted by someone who might give them away. On the day I had seen Christian outside Luigi's, claustrophobia had made him reckless, and he had gone into town to buy Penny a dress. That sighting of me, followed by Penny's slip in answering the phone, had sent them into a guilty panic, and the next day they had driven all the way to Thetford to consolidate their alibi with that postcard, and to ease their troubled consciences. Now they could say they'd been to Norfolk without actually lying.

When I asked him why he hadn't acknowledged me in Luigi's he said he wasn't absolutely certain I'd seen him. It was quite dark in the interior and he was hoping he'd got away with it.

‘What did you do all day?' I asked. ‘Was it like being married?'

‘Oh, I dunno,' said Christian vaguely. ‘Not a lot. Anyway, I never want to go through another week like that,' he added, which struck me as a curious thing to say about an experience of secret passion.

THE FIRST CHINKS
in Penny and Christian's relationship began to show during their second year of university. In order to be together they had, against parental advice on both sides, sacrificed their first choices of destination – at opposite ends of the country – and settled as a compromise on Exeter, their second choice. Penny was studying law, with a view to defending the innocent; Christian was studying maths and computing, with a view to making money.

In the first year Penny had been billeted in an all-female hall of residence, while Christian had a room in a tower block on campus. In their second year, when they were expected to make their own arrangements, they rented the top floor flat of a large house in Plymtree, a small village some miles from the university, with two of the girls from Penny's hall. It was Penny's generosity as chauffeuse that made this rural idyll possible: it inevitably fell to her to drive her housemates in to the campus in the morning and
home again at night. The ground floor of the accommodation was used as a vet's surgery – a detail that had seemed picturesque on paper, but proved less so in life.
There is a perpetual smell of wet dog about the place, and the traffic of sick animals and whelping from the waiting room is not conducive to study. The driveway and front garden are littered with diarrhoeic turds. You must come and stay
, as Penny put it in one of her letters to me. If it hadn't been for her correspondence I would have heard no news of Christian whatsoever, as he never made any effort to write himself. Every few weeks on a Sunday morning Mum would telephone him to reassure herself on three points. Was he well? Was he working? Was his grant lasting? There was no opportunity for anything but the most superficial exchange of news as we had always been given to understand that long-distance calls, like prawns and rump steak, were strictly for millionaires.

In fairness to Christian, he had never misled me about the probability of receiving any post. When the morning of his departure came, I'd watched with a lump in my throat as he struggled to fit his one small suitcase and anglepoise lamp into the back of the yellow Mini, which was already crammed to the roof with Penny's belongings.

‘You will write to me, won't you?' I said. It was September. I was still in summer clothes and flip-flops. The sumac trees hadn't even begun to turn red. The next time I saw him it would be midwinter, cold and branchbare.

Christian looked flummoxed by this request. ‘Write?' he said slowly. ‘I don't know about that. Unlikely, I'd say.' He turned to Penny, who was hunched behind the steering wheel, hemmed in by an advancing overhang of cushions, duvets, pot plants, holdalls and lampshades. ‘Writing letters,'
he said through the open window. ‘That's more your sort of thing, isn't it?'