Spider Light (2 page)

Straightforward overdose, they said resignedly. Stuffed himself chockful of sleeping pills–something prescribed by a GP–then downed the best part of a bottle of vodka. Poor boy. Or stupid sod, depending on your point of view. Whichever he was, he had been found near the riverbank, and an early-morning dog-walker had realized he was a bit more than just drunk, and had called the paramedics. Oh yes, he had been pumped clean, although he was still a bit drowsy and still very withdrawn. Yes, they had a name–Robards. Don Robards. They were giving him fifteen-minute obs and someone was trying to find out about family–there had not been any identification on him. But in the meantime he was stable, pretty much over the worst, and Dr Weston was welcome to him from here on.

The boy in the bed looked impossibly young. He had thick fair hair that would normally fall in a glossy thatch over his forehead; at the moment it was damp and matted from the sickness.

‘Hi,’ Antonia had said softly, sitting on the edge of the bed. ‘I’m Doctor Weston–Antonia Weston. I’m the on-call psychiatrist, and your doctors thought we might have a talk to see if I can help you.’

‘You can’t help me,’ said the boy. ‘I’ve found out something absolutely appalling, and I don’t want to be in a world where things like that can happen.’

He had turned to look at her then. His eyes were a very vivid blue; the pupils were still pinpoints from the sleeping pills, but they were perfectly sensible. He had reached in a questing, uncoordinated way for Antonia’s hand and without thinking much about it, she had taken his hand and held it hard.

Setting the nightmare in motion.

The blue car turned along a narrow lane winding off to the left, and was swallowed up by the trees and farmlands. Antonia discovered that she was shaking so violently she could barely grip the steering wheel. Half a mile on she came to a small village pub with a placard advertising bar food, and remembered that she
could quite openly walk inside and order food and sit at a table to eat it. Parking as close to the door as she could manage, she locked the car and went thankfully into the dim cool interior.

One of the things that had improved in the almost forgotten world was pub food. Antonia was directed to a small table near an inglenook, and served hot soup with a twist of fresh warm bread, a plateful of delicious home-cured ham with a crisp salad, and a large cup of fragrant coffee.

Three quarters of an hour later, feeling able to face all the demons in hell’s legions, she got back in her car, consulted the map carefully, and drove on to Amberwood and Charity Cottage.

Over the last five years Antonia had visualized doing quite a lot of things out in the world–some of them had been quite possible and sensible, and some of them had been so bizarre as to be wild daydream stuff–but none of them had included renting a former almshouse tucked into a remote sliver of the Cheshire countryside. As she drove away from the little pub the sky was overcast, and there was a feeling that even at three o’clock in the afternoon night was poised to sweep in. She managed to find her way back to the motorway and, although she kept glancing in the driving mirror, there was no sign of any dark blue hatchback tailing her.

Amberwood, when she finally reached it, was much nicer than she had expected. It was a small market town that looked as if it had not progressed much beyond the early years of the twentieth century. It did not appear to have reached the twenty-first century at all. Antonia found this rather endearing.

Driving along, the agent’s sketch map propped up on the dashboard, she passed what looked like an old watermill. It was low roofed and ancient-looking, and Antonia slowed down to take a better look. Yes, it was an old mill, built up against a reservoir. It was clearly disused but by no means derelict, and there was
what appeared to be some kind of memorial clock set into one of the gable-end walls.

She pulled on the handbrake and sat in the car for a moment considering the mill, wondering if it was a remnant of Victorian paternalism, or whether it might have been one of the dark satanic mills of Milton and Blake’s visions. No, it was too small for that, and probably in the wrong county as well. This was clearly a local affair, used to grind corn for the farmers and, despite its look of extreme age, it might only be eighty or so years since it had stopped working.

How must it have been to live in those days? Never travelling far but belonging to a close-knit group of people who knew one another’s histories and who stuck loyally by each other and shared the good and the bad equally: celebrations of births and weddings; mingled tears when there was death or sickness or hardship. It sounded very attractive. Oh sure, thought Antonia cynically, and I suppose the child-mortality rate sounds attractive as well, does it, and being carted off to the workhouse if you couldn’t pay your way, or the barbarism of surgery without anaesthetic…?

She drove on. The main street was pleasing: shops and tiny coffee places, and a small hotel at one end. There was a square with a war memorial–Amberwood had sent its share of young men to both world wars it seemed–and a number of the buildings had the unmistakably wavy look of extreme age and the straight chimneys beloved by the Tudors. Either the place came under the aegis of town planners with an unusual vein of municipal aestheticism, or the residents of Amberwood were militant about preserving their history, because there were no converted plate-glass-fronted monstrosities blurring Elizabethan or Queen Anne façades, and everywhere was immaculate. There was certainly a small supermarket, but it was tucked discreetly away in a side street, politely self-effacing amidst a couple of picture galleries, and craft shops of the dried-flowers and raffia-mat type.

I’ll still hate being here, thought Antonia but I can’t really hate any of this. I’ll come into the high street for shopping, and look
at the paintings, (I’ll manage to stay out for long enough to collect shopping and have a cup of coffee, surely to goodness!), and it’ll all become familiar and ordinary.

Quire House was efficiently signposted. It turned out to be a couple of miles outside the town centre, which was further than Antonia had been expecting. It was annoying to experience a fresh stab of panic at leaving the friendly cluster of streets and embark on a stretch of open road. She flipped the radio on, and voices instantly filled the car–a trailer for an afternoon play and a preview for a gardening programme.

Quire House itself was not visible from the road. There were double gates with stone pillars on each side and a neat sign pointed along a wide curving carriageway, proclaiming this was Amberwood’s ‘Museum and Craft Centre’, and that it was, ‘Open from 11.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. each day.’ Antonia glanced at the agent’s directions: once inside the gates she should turn immediately right and fifty yards on she would see an old brick wall, at which point she should turn sharp left and she would be there.

She turned right obediently, refusing to feel grateful for the high yew hedges which closed comfortingly around the narrow roadway. Here was the old brick wall; it looked as if it might once have had vines growing up it. Nice. In summer the bricks would be warm, and you could sit and read and dream. It occurred to her that there was all the time in the world for that now. Reading and music and dreams. Perhaps she would finally get round to reading things like Pepys’
Diaries
and listening to all Mahler’s symphonies–Richard used to say her musical tastes were hopelessly unadventurous. She was aware of a sudden stab of longing to hear Richard calling her unadventurous again–in fact, to hear Richard calling her anything at all.

She swung the car to the left, and, just as the directions had said, she was there.

It was the ugliest house she had ever seen and if, as its name suggested, it had once been somebody’s idea of charity for the
indigent, Antonia was glad she had not been the recipient because it looked as if it had been a very bleak charity indeed.

It was built of dirty-looking stone, which might have been attractive if the stones had weathered or mellowed, but they had not and the cottage was all hard angles–an oblong box with a no-frills roof slapped firmly onto its walls. Antonia, who had subconsciously been expecting rose-red brick, latticed windows and a garden with lupins and hollyhocks, took note of the fact that the place was sturdy and weatherproof, even down to the uncompromisingly modern windows someone had thought it suitable to install: square white frames in heavy-duty plastic. The front door, which was on the left-hand side of the house, was of the same white plastic, with an unpleasant steel letterbox like a rat-trap mouth.

But you did not live on the outside of a house, so it didn’t really matter what the place looked like. Antonia produced the key, and discovered a particular pleasure in inserting it in the lock and pushing the door open with a proprietorial air. No matter what it’s like, she thought, for the next two months it’s mine. Providing I don’t play loud music at one a.m. or hold orgies of the bacchanalian kind, no one can boot me out or come crashing in to disturb me.

There was a moment when she felt the past brush her mind, exactly as it had done while looking at the ancient watermill. Like stepping up to the windows of an old house to peer through its cobwebby panes and seeing a blurred flicker of movement from within.

But the moment passed, and she went inside, aware only of curiosity as the scents and atmosphere of this as yet unknown place folded round her. The main door opened straight into a fair-sized sitting room, and it was at once apparent that the inside of Charity Cottage was far nicer than the outside. The sitting room had a brick fireplace enclosing an electric fire, and the furniture was better than she had hoped: a sofa, a couple of easy chairs, a low coffee table and some nice framed sketches on the walls.
The windows, one on each side of the door, overlooked grassy parkland.

As well as being nicer, the cottage was deeper than it had looked. A door opened off the sitting room onto a large inner room with stairs winding up to the first floor. This had been utilized as a small dining room. There was a gateleg table with four bentwood chairs, and an oak dresser with blue and white plates. Antonia, glancing towards the stairs, thought the bedrooms could wait, and went through to the back of the cottage. This would be the kitchen, and hopefully there would be the promised crockery and cutlery, and a workable hot-water system. She pushed open the door which was of the old-fashioned kind with a high iron latch.

A bolt of such strong emotion hit her it was as if she had received a hard blow across her face. The room spun sickeningly, and Antonia reached blindly for the solid old door to prevent herself falling. For several nightmare moments she clung to it, fighting for breath, struggling to get free of the waves of fear. Stop hyperventilating, you idiot, take deep, slow breaths–you know how it goes. In for a count of five, out for a count of five. She concentrated and, after a moment, was able to let go of the door frame and shakily straighten up.

It was, indeed, an entirely ordinary kitchen: sink, draining board, some cupboards and worktops–not up-to-the-minute, state-of-the-art stuff, but not so very old. There was even a grocery box on one of the worktops, which struck a friendly note. Antonia investigated this, and found a compliments slip tucked inside.

There was a scrawled signature–Godfrey Toy, and the legend at the top said:

And if you were going to tumble without warning into a bottomless black well of panic, at least the climb back to normality was more pleasant if there was a box of groceries and a friendly note waiting for you at the top. Antonia liked the idea of someone who stored keys in teapots like Lewis Carroll’s dormouse.

Closer investigation revealed that the unknown Dr Toy’s tastes ran classily to a hefty portion of Brie, some beautifully fresh French bread, an earthenware dish of pâté, a dozen free-range eggs, some pre-packaged strips of smoked salmon, a bag of apples and one of plums, and four neat half bottles of wine–two red and two white. With the tinned food and cartons of milk she had bought with her, this added up to quite a well-stocked larder. I’ll learn to be a householder all over again, thought Antonia, carefully distributing everything on shelves and in cupboards. I’ll have a milk delivery and newspapers.

The rest of the cottage was fairly predictable. There were three bedrooms upstairs and a bathroom which had clearly been fashioned from an old box room. Clean sheets waited in an airing cupboard, and there was a modern immersion heater for hot water–she switched this on at once, and then lugged her suitcases up the stairs. After some food, and one of Dr Toy’s half bottles of wine, she would feel in tune with the world again. In fact, she might make that two half bottles of wine.

She had not brought very much with her, aside from clothes and food, except for a small CD player, along with her CDs, and a carton of books. After she had cooked a meal from tins and Dr Toy’s hospitality, she sorted through the CDs.

Once she would automatically have reached for Mozart, but tonight she needed something stronger, something that reflected her mood and knew how it felt to fall fathoms deep into the heart
of black bitter agony, but something that also demonstrated how the agony could be torn out and ripped to shreds before it was exultantly discarded. Schumann’s Fourth? She did not know very much about the lives and motivations of the great composers–what she did know she had picked up from Richard–but she knew Schumann had created that symphony on emerging from a period of intense depression, and that it depicted the trapped, tortured spirit finally breaking free of dark savage unhappiness and soaring joyfully into the light.

After that flight of rhetoric it would have to be Schumann. Antonia thought she would pour a glass of Godfrey Toy’s wine, and then curl into the deep armchair by the window and listen to the symphony. The rain pattered lightly against the glass and a little gusting wind stirred the thin curtains, but inside the cottage it was warm and safe.

Warm and safe. Except for that well of clutching terror that might still lie waiting for her in that perfectly ordinary kitchen…Except for that blue hatchback that seemed to have followed her for three quarters of the journey here…

Dr Godfrey Toy looked out of his window on Quire House’s first floor, and was pleased to see lights in the windows of Charity Cottage.

It was very nice to think of someone being in the cottage for the winter; Godfrey always felt much safer when people were around him. Stupid, of course, but ever since–well, ever since what he privately called the tragedy–he had always been a touch uneasy about being in a house by himself. Just a touch. Particularly at night, and particularly in a house the size of Quire–all those empty rooms below him, all those stored-up memories.

But he loved living at Quire; he loved his flat with the high-ceilinged rooms and the big windows. This summer he had had the men in to spruce it up. He had chuckled quietly to himself over this, because it sounded exactly like a twittery maiden lady furtively recounting something slightly risqué. I’m having men in, my dear.

Anyway, they had done a good job–nothing grand, just a coat of emulsion everywhere, well, and one or two rolls of wallpaper if you were keeping tally. And, if you wanted to be really pedantic, a few licks of varnish to banisters and picture rails. But nothing so very much, and it had cost the merest of meres, despite the professor’s caustic comments about extravagance. Anyway, Godfrey considered it money well spent.

His flat had a view over Quire’s grounds. They were nothing elaborate, they were not in the Capability Brown or Gertrude Jekyll league, but Godfrey enjoyed them. The Trust kept everywhere in immaculate order, and visitors to the museum were very good about observing the ‘Do Not Leave Litter’ signs, although you still got the odd sprinkling of picnic wrappings, and occasionally there were other kinds of detritus which Godfrey preferred not to put a name to. (He could never understand people choosing somewhere so
public
for that kind of carrying-on.)

The letting agent had told him that a single lady had taken Charity Cottage. No, they said, in response to Godfrey’s anxious questioning, they did not know anything about her. They did not need to know anything, they added, except that she had paid two months’ rent in advance and the cheque had been cleared. She was a Miss Weston, and had given a London address. All entirely in order and Quire Trust might think itself fortunate to have a tenant for the place during November and December. And so Godfrey, who did think the Trust fortunate to have a tenant in the cottage for November and December, and who was pleased at the thought of a possible new friend, had put together what he thought of as a welcome-to-Quire box, and had felt guiltily relieved that Professor Remus was away because he would have been a bit scathing about it. An unnecessary gesture, he would have said, in the tone he always used when Godfrey gave way to an impulse. If he had seen the contents of the box he would have said, with sarcasm, ‘Good God, foie gras and smoked salmon, how very luxurious!’