The Secrets Between Us (13 page)

I was becoming used to the countryside. I had begun to appreciate the seasonal changes that you don’t see in a city, or at least not to the same extent. The light and temperature used to change with the seasons in Manchester, but in Somerset everything was slightly different every day. The hedgerows were full of berries, the bird droppings around the house were purple with blackberries, and my boots crunched hazelnut shells already broken by squirrels and littered along the pavements.

By now, the people of Burrington Stoke knew I was Jamie’s nanny and that I lived at Avalon. They always asked
if there was any news of Genevieve, and they told me things about her.

Midge Taylor in the Spar said her sister used to be in the same branch of the Pony Club as Genevieve and that Genevieve had run her parents ragged as a teenager.

‘It was Mrs Churchill’s own fault, my sister said,’ said Midge. ‘She kept such an eagle eye on Genevieve that, the minute her back was turned, Gen would be up to no good! She used to climb out of her bedroom window and
ride
into the village to get to the Young Farmers’ parties, tie the horse up outside and ride it back again when the party finished! All the boys had a thing for her, and all the girls wanted to be like her. She was so much fun!’

‘Why wasn’t she allowed to go to the parties?’ I asked.

Midge shook her head. ‘Boys,’ she mouthed.

Joyce Hope, the teaching assistant at school, told me that Genevieve had contrived to get herself expelled from two of the best and most expensive boarding schools in Britain because she couldn’t stand the regimentation.

‘Heaven knows how she managed to get into university,’ said Joyce. ‘I think the Churchills paid for some private cramming, or else they must have pulled some strings, because that girl was far happier outside with her horses than she was inside with her books.’

I smiled at the stories of Genevieve’s courage and daring. They made me more curious about her. Alexander never told me anything much, so I had to put together what bits and pieces of information I could gather. When I was on my own, at Avalon, I tried to imagine how Genevieve must have felt. She was living in the same house as I was, drawing the same curtains, cooking in the same pans. I tried to make myself feel like Genevieve, in order to understand what she had come to dislike about her life so much that she had walked out of it. She lived in a house that was big and unruly but which must have suited her lifestyle. She had a beautiful,
healthy son and was married to Alexander, and even if things weren’t perfect between them, surely they couldn’t have been
that
bad. She was a champion rider, who had access to the best horses and could exercise them in some of the loveliest countryside in England. Why would anyone in her right mind walk away from all that?

There were only two people who could answer that question. Genevieve wasn’t there; and Alexander refused to talk about his marriage although he sometimes, inadvertently, told me some small detail about his life with Genevieve.

He showed me how to recognize a sloe berry and made me bite into one, and I was horrified by the way it dried my mouth, thinking I was poisoned. He laughed and said: ‘Gen used to love collecting those!’

‘What for?’ I asked, tapping my parched tongue against the inside of my cheek.

‘Sloe gin. She made it every autumn so it was ready in time for Christmas.’

‘Sloe what?’

‘You just need berries and sugar and gin. It makes a liqueur that’s better than anything you can buy in the shops. It was one of her little rituals.’

The next day, when I was alone in Avalon, I took down the recipe books from the shelf beside the Rayburn. Alongside a very tattered Mrs Beeton and two Jamie Olivers that looked as if they’d hardly been used, I found a homemade book. Inside were hand-written recipes for soups, pies and pastries and, sure enough, glued to the back cover was a piece of lined paper with instructions for making sloe gin.

On the way home from school that afternoon, Jamie and I duly picked a bagful of the tight little black berries with their silvery bloom. He solemnly pricked the fruit and poked it through the necks of well-washed empty squash bottles
while I measured out the sugar and the gin. It felt right to be doing something that Genevieve always did, carrying on the tradition.

Another day Jamie asked if we could go to the conker tree.

‘I don’t know where the conker tree is,’ I told him, and he said he would show me. It was at the back of the village hall, a huge, old horse-chestnut with leaves that were browning and curling, and branches ripe with seed-pods. We collected conkers, dozens of them, from the grass beneath the tree. I watched Jamie, who was always happy when he had a task to undertake, and I felt a little sad for Genevieve that she was not here to see her son.

Later Alexander sat for hours at the kitchen table, skewering holes through the middles of the biggest conkers and threading string through. Jamie sat opposite him, with his head in his arms, watching his father and swinging his legs. When one conker had been successfully attached to its string, Jamie would select the next from the pile and slide it across the table. Neither of them said a word but they were so alike in their concentration on the task in hand. Jamie could not have had a more attentive father.

I had dropped Jamie off at school one day and was walking back to Avalon when I met a tall, thin, gypsy of a man with deep-set eyes and yellowy dreadlocks. Even though it was a warm day, he wore a long coat and worn old boots. He was leaning against the garden wall of one of the village houses, smoking a roll-up. Behind him, scraggy chickens scratched in the soil of their pen and washing flapped on a line stretched across the garden. He raised a hand in greeting when he saw me.

‘Hi,’ I said tentatively. I thought he might be just passing through. People who looked like him sometimes did, on their way to Glastonbury.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m Jamie’s uncle, Damian.’

I recognized him at once. This was Claudia’s brother. I could see some likeness between the two of them; although he was so thin and she was the opposite, they had the same slightly hooded eyes and an identical jowliness about the chin.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘And you’re the infamous nanny.’

His voice betrayed his origins. He tried to disguise the public-school consonants behind a lazy West Country burr, but it didn’t work. He said the word ‘nanny’ with a slight sneer, as if being hired help was something to be ashamed of. For all his hippy pretensions, he was still, at heart, an upper-class snob.

I smiled in a businesslike way.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘I’ve been watching you,’ he said.

I was determined not to let him have the satisfaction of scaring me.

‘I expected you to be less conventional, Damian. Everyone’s watching me,’ I said.

He laughed.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘And fair play to you for standing up to Virginia.’

‘I don’t stand up to her,’ I said. ‘I just keep out of her way.’

He laughed again, a slightly nervy, high-pitched laugh.

‘Do you mind if I walk with you for a while?’ he asked.

The pavement wasn’t wide enough to accommodate us both, and the road was busy with school traffic, so I went in front, with Damian following behind. I found his presence unnerving. I hoped he wasn’t looking me up and down, sizing me up.

‘Are you staying in Burrington Stoke?’ I asked when the pavement widened at the new quarry junction and he came alongside me.

He shook his head.

‘I’d rather cut off my right hand than stay here. I just came back to see if it was true about Genevieve being missing.’

‘I’m afraid it is,’ I said.

‘How perfectly karmic,’ Damian said.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘A life for a life, Genevieve for my mother.’

I thought maybe Damian really was slightly unhinged.

‘Nobody’s suggesting she’s dead,’ I said quickly.

‘I think she is. Don’t you?’

He was making me uncomfortable.

‘How did you find out she was gone?’ I asked.

‘The old bill found me. They tracked me down. Fair play to them.’

He looked around him at the neat, mown grass verge beside the quarry entrance and exit. The grass was pale with stone-dust.

‘We could sit here for a while,’ Damian suggested. ‘Have a smoke and a chinwag.’

‘I ought to get back to Avalon,’ I said. I delved for an excuse. ‘I’m expecting a delivery.’

‘OK.’

He looked over to the gatehouse. The guard had spotted him. He was speaking into his phone.

‘I’m not exactly Mr Popular round here,’ Damian said, grinning. ‘In fact, they don’t like me at all.’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a white van heading down the track inside the quarry. The gatehouse guard had put down his phone and put on his cap.

The last thing I needed was to be caught up in a scuffle between Damian and the quarrymen. I imagined what Virginia would have to say about that.

‘Why don’t you come back for coffee at Avalon?’ I suggested.

‘I don’t know …’

‘We’ll just sit outside, in the garden.’

The long red and white pole that formed the barrier across the quarry exit was slowly rising. Any moment now and the gates would swing open and the van would come through.

‘Go on then,’ said Damian. ‘If you insist.’

He was a good few years older than me, but still, of the two of us, I felt like the adult. I could feel how uncomfortable he was in the world. It was sad that his life had been derailed by his parents’ divorce when he was so young, and I was sorry for him but, at the same time, he gave me the creeps.

He followed me up the track that led to Avalon, but hung back when we came to the garden gate. I asked if he was not familiar with the house.

‘I’ve never been here before,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘When I was a kid this house was rented out to tenants. We weren’t encouraged to fraternize with the peasantry.’

‘Oh. But surely when your sister lived here …’

‘Half-sister.’

‘You never came when Genevieve was here?’

‘Didn’t anyone tell you I’m persona extremely non grata in these parts?’

‘I heard the exile was self-inflicted,’ I said.

‘Even if it was, I’d never have set foot in any house where darling Genevieve lived,’ he said. The bitterness in his voice stopped me from asking any further questions.

Damian asked for decaffeinated tea. I didn’t have any. In the end he settled for a glass of tap water and I drank instant coffee. We sat in the garden, and the mournful sound of the sirens drifted across the fields from the quarry. I heard the sound at least three times a week; it was a warning that there were going to be blasts at the rockface, and I wasn’t used to it yet. It seemed to go on for ages, and although I realized its purpose was primarily to ensure no living thing
remained in the area that was about to be dynamited, still the sound seemed sinister to me.

Damian had noticed my discomfort.

‘Know what? That noise is so familiar to me that I quite miss it,’ he said. ‘When I was a kid, I used to run down the hill when I heard the siren. There’s a point at the edge of the woods where you can see the blast and, a few seconds later, there’s this deafening sound like an air crash, and the rush of air hits you. I used to find it exhilarating.’

He laughed, but there was a note of cynicism in his voice.

‘Why don’t they like you being up at the quarry?’ I asked.

He shrugged self-deprecatingly and cleared his throat, and I knew he was going to tell me something about himself that made him proud.

‘It’s my life’s ambition to close it down,’ he said. He turned his glass in his dirty fingers, waiting for my response.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because it’s wrong. Everything about it is wrong. The Churchills are pillaging one environment for the raw ingredients they can sell on to destroy another.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘They take stone from here, and it’s used to build roads, executive houses, shopping centres, whatever, elsewhere, fucking up the environment all over the place while they get rich on the profits.’

‘Oh.’

Damian’s voice was sounding less self-conscious now. As he became more passionate about his theme, the upper-class vowels made themselves clear despite his best efforts.

‘The whole thing stinks,’ he said. ‘What right does the Churchill family have to blast into that hill and profit from their vandalism? They have no more right to the land than anyone else.’

I picked a stem of grass that had grown a seedhead.

‘I suppose they own it …’ I said, stripping the seeds from the stem.

‘How can they “own” something that took millions of years to form?’ Damian asked. ‘It doesn’t belong to anyone. It belongs to us all. Up until a few decades ago, that land was a perfect hill. It was covered in woodland, ancient woodland that was home to all manner of flowers and trees, butterflies, animals, and now it’s all being blasted away for the commercial gain of my family. Once they’ve finished with it, they’ll be wealthier, but nothing will be able to grow there. It’ll just be another abandoned quarry. Another eyesore. A dead place, a murdered place. Do you think that’s right?’

I could not reply. If I sympathized with his point of view I would be being disloyal to Alexander’s in-laws, Jamie’s grandparents, yet I could not argue with what Damian said, because it was true; he was right. I realized that inviting him back to Avalon had been a mistake. It wasn’t that we had nothing to talk about but that there was nothing we
could
talk about. I pretended to be worried about the non-existent delivery and was relieved when Damian said he had other places to be.

I asked if there was any way to get in touch with him, in case there was news of Genevieve.

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no way to get in touch.’

‘At least tell me where you’ll be?’

He shrugged. I felt a twinge of frustration.

‘Damian, what if we need to contact you?’

‘You won’t,’ he said. ‘If Genevieve’s body turns up, I’ll read about it in the newspapers.’