The Lost Guide to Life and Love (24 page)

The wind whipped around the cottage and icy rain slashed against the windows. I felt sorry for the sheep. And even more sorry for Kate Alderson, buzzing around on the quad bike, taking feed up to them. I snuggled back down under my duvet, knowing that down at the farm they had been out in the weather for hours. I had one more interview to do—a farmer’s wife who made proper puddings, sticky toffee, lemon and ginger, and gooey chocolate, all in a converted barn—and then I could go home again. I was tempted to nip down to London and just come back up, but that seemed a bit feeble just to escape from the weather. While I was here I could do more research for other pieces that I could come back up and do another time—in the summer, perhaps. Did they have summer up here? It seemed hard to believe right now. I pushed the duvet back and plodded off to the shower. If I wanted communication with the world, I was going to have to drive to find it.

No word from Clayton, though the papers were full of him again. Apparently he’d played brilliantly the night before. ‘He may not be a terrorist, but he certainly terrified the opposition,’ was the general theme. Simeon Maynard was in the news too. A couple of his deputies had left his companies with no warning. ‘Are these rats deserting the sinking ship while the vultures begin to circle?’ asked one
paper with a wonderful rag-bag of mixed metaphors. The more serious newspapers were talking of investigations by the Serious Fraud Office and the Department of Trade and Industry. I wondered how Jake was getting on with his own investigations.

I had plenty of time to read the papers. The foul weather meant that the pub was practically deserted. Dexter was trying to do some paperwork.

‘Aren’t you tempted to go back to full-time photography?’ I asked idly, looking at some of the colour supplement pages, and thinking what a cracking job he’d made of the Matty pictures.

‘Yes and no. Yes because I enjoy it. It’s what I do. What I am. But no, not the same as I was doing before. I’ve been there, done that, and buggered up a marriage partly because of it. Or married the wrong woman in the first place. I want to take pictures but I don’t want my old life.’ He shrugged. ‘Something will work out.’ Again he pushed his hair out of his eyes. ‘Bloody hair,’ he muttered. ‘Must get it cut.’

‘I’ll cut it for you,’ said Becca brightly, coming in from the kitchen with mugs of tea for us. ‘I’ll do it now, if you like. After all,’ she looked round the empty bar, ‘we’re not exactly rushed off our feet.’

‘Are you safe with scissors?’ Dexter asked warily.

‘Had a Saturday job at
Through the Looking Glass.
I’ve cut hair loads of times. And let’s face it,’ she looked witheringly at his tangled curls, ‘I can’t make it much worse, can I? When did you last have it cut?’

‘Um, for my dad’s funeral, I suppose.’

‘Dexter, that was a year ago! Get in the back now! Tilly—shout ifwe have a customer.’

While the back room was turned into a salon, I settled at the computer. There was a nice email from my mother
thanking me for the scarf. ‘Wonderful to think that there is still such talent in a place like Hartstone Edge,’ she said. ‘It is so bright and cheerful I am looking forward to wearing it.’

Bright and cheerful? Mum sounded positively chirpy. Maybe the accident and the enforced rest had done her some good.

After about twenty minutes, Becca appeared in the bar. ‘Are you ready for the transformation?’ she asked. Dexter followed her, looking a bit embarrassed but totally different. Becca had done a great job. Dexter’s hair now lay in crisp flat curls close to his head. The new cut emphasised his strong features and made him somehow look more purposeful. I’d always thought he was quite good looking, but now I could actually see his face and his wide grey eyes I realised he was handsome—in a rugged, lived-in sort of way. Becca raised her eyebrows and gave me a quick conspiratorial grin as we admired him.

‘Thanks, Becca. I can see where I’m going now,’ said Dexter as he came and sat next to me at the other computer. ‘The paperwork can wait. I’m going to get on with this.’ And he gestured towards a huge pile of old photos, part of the project that he’d been raving about with Matty.

‘How many have you got there?’ I asked. ‘You must have hundreds!’

‘Word’s got round that I’m interested,’ he said. ‘People keep turning up with them. There were two sisters in yesterday brought me this lot…’ He held up a bulging carrier bag. ‘…They’ve been clearing out their mother’s house and found all these. They’ve kept a few, but didn’t know what to do with the rest so gave them to me. They heard I was collecting.’

‘Are you?’

‘Well, yes, although I never thought it would take off like
this. Some of these are brilliant. Lots of old family snaps, of course, but others that go back a hundred years or more, portraits and pictures of people at work. Obviously a professional photographer was going round capturing “picturesque” scenes. Fascinating. Some of them are a bit fragile, so that’s why I’m scanning them in, so at least we’ll have permanent records of them.’

‘Pity there’s nowhere to display them.’

‘Exactly. Oh, there are a few in a couple of the local museums, and you can buy prints of some of them, the most famous ones. Everyone has that Granny Allen and her Bible picture. But it would be great to have a proper display.’

‘How are you doing matching up people and their ancestors?’

‘That’s really taken off as well. I took a picture of those sisters on the steps of the old chapel. Their parents were married there, so we have the wedding photo. That’s good because, not only does it show the family, but it shows how the chapel’s changed too. It looks very sad now compared with its glory days.’

I tried to imagine what it must have been like when the chapel had been full of people belting out hymns.

With nothing better to do—and perhaps because I was still hoping Clayton might ring—I stayed in the pub for the rest of the morning, helping Dexter with the pictures as he tried to sort them into groups. The faces were fascinating—a man and a boy cutting peat, a boy lying back with his leg in a sort of splint. He was knitting and staring, fascinated, at the camera.

‘It must be odd to have so many professional pictures of a place like Hartstone,’ I said, as I put some more into the ‘Farm workers’ folder. ‘He must have made a few trips up here, because these are taken at different times of year.’ The boy and the horse were taken against a light covering of
snow. Some of the others looked as though they were taken in high summer. Others could be any time.

‘Something must have kept the photographer coming back.’

‘Something—or someone.’

We got on with the sorting and scanning. Dexter seemed to have set himself a pretty enormous task. An email pinged in for me. ‘From Matty,’ I said, surprised.

‘Oh, what does she say?’ asked Dexter eagerly.

I skimmed the message quickly. It was mainly about the triumph of beating the paparazzi at their own game. And thanking me for the tip-off. But there was more.

‘She’s sent me some pictures.’

I downloaded them, about a dozen or so, and clicked open on each thumbnail image and laughed. They were clearly photos she’d taken during the fashion shoot in Egypt. But while she’d been waiting her turn, she’d taken pictures of the other models—but showing all the tricks that you never normally know about. You could see an assistant flapping a fan to create the windswept look, another holding a piece of cotton attached to the hem of a skirt so it flared at just the right angle. A dog apparently looking eagerly at the model’s face was actually looking at another assistant who was holding a piece of meat, just out of shot.

Then there was a shot of the model standing on a camera case, and the photographer kneeling on the sand at her feet. Then a better one of the model toppling over and landing in a heap laughing. And all the stylists and assistants rushing to get her right again and someone triumphantly holding up a false eyelash that had fallen in the sand.

Dexter was looking at the pictures, smiling but appraising. ‘I always knew she had a good eye,’ he said approvingly. ‘Could you forward these to my email? Do you think Matt would mind?’

‘I’m sure she wouldn’t,’ I said, and pushed the keyboard over to him so he could type in his address. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was
precisely
what Matt had hoped for.

A little while later he came over with a bottle of very good wine and poured me a glass. ‘A thank you,’ he said, ‘for help in sorting this lot out.’

I put my hand over the glass when he offered more. I wasn’t going to go slithering down the beck again.

‘It’s all right. I’ll give you a lift and if you tell me when tomorrow I’ll come and get you. Least I can do.’

As it was raining and the wine was good, I said, ‘Yes please. Thank you.’

True to his word, he took me back to the cottage and came in for a moment. ‘I know every stone of this house and still have some of the scars to prove it,’ he laughed. ‘It’s good to see it lived in.’

He bent down to look out of the small window and immediately picked up the tiny bit of buckle with the scrap of velvet ribbon. ‘There’s a story there, I expect,’ he said, turning it over in his hand. Then his eye fell on Granny Allen’s sampler. ‘
“Carpe diem. Seize the day.”
What’s that meant to mean?’ he said.

‘I think it means making the most of the moment—don’t wait for things to happen but do something about it.’

‘
Carpe diem
,’ said Dexter, running his hand over his newly cropped hair, while the other still held the buckle and its scrap of ribbon. ‘Why not? Got to be worth a go, hasn’t it?’

Kate invited me to lunch on Sunday. Proper roast pork with all the trimmings. As Guy carved and Kate passed the plates round, Tom bowed his head and I thought for a moment he was going to say grace. Instead he intoned in tones of deep solemnity, ‘Let us remember Pinky, poor pig of this
parish, who died that the rest of us might stuff our faces this lunchtime.’ And he crossed himself very piously while the twins giggled.

‘Oh dear,’ I said, remembering the happy snuffling pigs I’d watched rootling round their patch of ground. ‘Was this one of yours?’

‘Yes,’ said Tom, still solemn, ‘I am happy to say that I knew my dinner well. It’s fair to say we were on speaking terms—well, grunting on her part, but we communicated on a deeper level. But her living has not been in vain. It is a far far better thing. Oh sod this,’ he said back in his normal voice. ‘Pass the gravy please.’

We ate large chunks of poor Pinky, with crispy roast potatoes, honeyed parsnips and mounds of crunchy carrots and red cabbage with apple, followed by a deliciously sharp blackberry pie and creamy homemade custard. ‘We’ll have you know,’ said Zak, ‘that we picked all these blackberries and we’ve got the scratches to prove it.’

All the time the chat was of the farm and friends and Tom teased the twins and Zak teased Ruth and Guy teased Zak. They were still full of Dexter and Matty’s impromptu photo shoot.

‘I’m definitely going to be a model,’ said Ruth. ‘Everyone else runs round and does the work and Matty just stands there looking beautiful. Easy.’

‘Eew,’ said Zak, affecting a model-like demeanour, ‘Ay’m just driving my tractor through the yard. Oh, please don’t get pig shit on my thousand-pound trousers.’

And so it went on, with a great deal of laughter, and I thought a little sadly of the perfectly pleasant but quiet Sunday lunches my mother and I had always had together when I was a child. Suddenly I felt sorry for myself that I’d missed out on this cheerful chaos of family life, and just as sorry for my mum. And I wondered how life would have
been if my father and brother had just been a minute or so later setting out that day…

In the middle of it all, Matty rang; she was at the airport waiting for a delayed flight to London, longing to catch up on her sleep and her washing.

‘We’re eating Pinky!’ bellowed Zak down the phone. ‘She was lovely.’ And the phone was passed around and I too had a brief chat with Matty.

‘What’s all this about Clayton Silver being a terrorist?’ she asked. ‘I’ve just heard about it.’

‘Trust me. He’s not. And it was actually all my fault. Well, partly.’

‘What? How?’

‘Too complicated to tell you now, but let’s just say he was rescuing a damsel in distress. And though he drove like a maniac and parked in a daft place, he’s no more a terrorist than you are. Or Pinky.’

‘OK, I believe you,’ laughed Matt. ‘Did you get my email?’

‘Yes. I thought the pictures were brilliant. So did Dexter. I hope you don’t mind, but he was sitting next to me when they came, so I had to show him.’

‘Sure. What did he think?’

‘He loved them. He said you had a natural eye.’

‘Did he really?’ She sounded excited.

‘He did. Didn’t you show them to the photographers you were working with?’

‘You’re joking, aren’t you? They wouldn’t even bother to look. But Dexter thought they were good?’

‘Yes, he did. Really.’

Even on a mobile from an Egyptian airport, I thought I could hear a small sigh of satisfaction.

‘Anyway, I’m intrigued by how you turned Clayton Silver into a terrorist. After I’m back, when you have time, ring me and tell me the whole sorry story.’

‘I will. I will,’ I said, passing the phone back to Kate.

Afterwards, while the twins and Tom cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, Guy, Kate and I sat down in front of the fire with cups of tea and the papers. The heat from the fire was glorious compared to the grim day outside, and it made my toes curl up with happiness. Guy was soon snoring gently,
The Sunday Times
fluttering up and down on his chest. Kate went into the kitchen to see that all the clearing up had been done properly. Then, just as I was dozing off myself, she started going out to the car with tins and trays of cakes.

‘Let me give you a hand,’ I said, shuffling my feet back into their shoes.

‘Thanks, that would be good.’ She was struggling to hold the car door open in the wind. We soon had things loaded up.