The Shadow Year (7 page)

August

In the end it takes them three weeks to find both the time and energy to head up to the mysterious plot of land bequeathed to Lila, and when they do eventually drive out of London, any romantic ideas either of them may have privately entertained about a carefree summer road trip are quickly laid to rest. ‘It’s just as well we packed our coats,’ says Tom, his jaw clenched and his knuckles white on the steering wheel as rain splatters loudly onto the windscreen.

‘Yes,’ agrees Lila, staring out at the distorted red smudges of brake lights ahead. ‘Not exactly the day they promised, is it?’ Another gust of wind hits the car and suddenly the wipers don’t seem to move fast enough.

‘Perhaps we should have waited. According to your map it’s going to be quite a trek, some of it on foot. It’s not going to be much fun in this weather.’

Your
map. She can already feel Tom washing his hands of the day. ‘You didn’t
have
to come, you know.’

‘I didn’t mean . . .’ He hesitates, trying to choose his words carefully. ‘What I meant is . . .’ He gives up. ‘Look, I want to be here with you, OK?’

She nods and feels his glance in her direction but she still can’t bring herself to look at him. She is worried that if she does the floodgates might open, that he might start talking about the terrible thing that hangs between them, the thing neither of them have discussed since the day she was released from the hospital. And she’s not sure she can bear that, not today. The effect of the pills she swallowed with her breakfast is already waning.

‘I’m trying, Lila,’ he says. ‘I really am.’

‘I know.’ She looks out at the traffic and twists the thin gold band of her wedding ring around her finger, considers reaching across to touch him, a small gesture of reconciliation. She wants to reassure him that she is trying too, that she still loves him; but the words stick in her throat and her hands remain folded in her lap, her face fixed upon the road ahead.

The first time she’d ever seen Tom was at a bus stop in Crouch End. He’d been leaning against the shelter, a battered leather satchel at his feet, his suit jacket flapping in the wind and a dog-eared paperback in his hands. She’d watched his eyes skimming quickly across its pages.
Never trust a man who doesn’t read books
: it was a piece of advice once offered by her father – long-forgotten for she couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen years old at the time – but standing there on the pavement, watching this unknown man with his slightly furrowed brow and his scuffed shoes, her father’s words had come drifting back to her.

She’d watched him for a while, noting how his lips moved occasionally as his eyes traced the words on the page and when the bus had eventually arrived she’d sat at the very back and distracted herself with the shifting scenes outside the window, only once or twice allowing herself to search for a glimpse of him: the crease in his shirt collar . . . the curve of his jaw . . . that sticking-up tuft of hair on his crown that she imagined hardly ever lay flat.

The
reader
, as he had been labelled in her head, wasn’t there the next morning, or the next, but on the fourth day he was back, leaning in the same position against the bus shelter, this time with a different book in his hands. As the bus arrived, Lila had followed him up the aisle and slid into the empty seat beside him, glancing down at the book lying in his lap. He’d smiled a crooked smile and held the cover up for her to see. ‘Busted, sorry,’ she’d apologised, flushing pink.

‘No, I’m the same . . . always like to know what other people are reading.’

‘Is it any good?’ she’d asked, nodding her head in the direction of the hefty paperback with its shouty, gold-embossed title.

‘It’s OK. I borrowed it from a friend. To be honest,’ he’d said, ‘it’s not really my thing, but I hate not finishing a book once I’ve started it.’

‘Me too,’ she’d agreed. ‘That’s why I never bothered with
War and Peace
.’

‘Or
Moby Dick
.’

‘Or
Anna Karenina
.’

They’d smiled at one another and by the time the bus had crawled through rush hour and reached Holborn they’d broken all of London’s unspoken public transport rules and swapped names and phone numbers.

He was a design engineer, specialising in bridges. He’d told her all about it in the pub two nights later. His work took him all over the country but he was in London for a few more weeks, staying with friends in Crouch End while he inspected several constructions and drew up plans for a new design out near Stratford. ‘It’s all part of the plans to regenerate the area.’

She’d nodded and tried to decide if it sounded really interesting or really boring.

‘It’s not all hard hats and clipboards,’ he’d said, as if reading her mind. ‘The inspection stuff is OK, but what I really love is the design work. A bridge should never be boring, just a means of getting from A to B; it should be as appealing as the buildings surrounding it, as dynamic as the landscape it’s a part of.’

She’d nodded, but she’d only been half listening, her attention caught by the intensity of his brown eyes as he spoke about his work and the jagged white scar across his right cheek that disappeared into a laughter line when he smiled. She’d reached out to touch it with the tip of her finger.

‘My younger brother,’ he’d said smiling, ‘shot me with a pellet gun when I was eight. Siblings eh?’

She’d smiled. ‘I’m an only child.’

‘Well there you go, a lucky escape. I bet you carry a few less scars?’

Lila had shrugged. She knew she probably bore her own scars, in her own way. ‘I always wanted brothers and sisters,’ she’d confessed. ‘It can be lonely being an only child.’

He’d eyed her over his pint glass. ‘So what do
you
do, Lila?’

She’d told him that she was a designer too, of sorts. ‘Interiors, property renovation. I work for corporate clients, you know, upgrading office spaces, usually creative industries,
media types
.’ She said it with an affected drawl and they’d shared a grin. ‘But I take on the occasional private client too; sometimes a house or a flat.’

‘That sounds like fun.’ He’d smiled at her and a crackle of static had hung in the air between them.

They barely knew one another but as he’d walked her home much later, their bodies swaying drunkenly, he’d pushed her against the shuttered side of a newsagent and kissed her in the strobing light of a faulty street lamp, neither of them caring who saw. They’d only stopped when the sky had exploded around them with sudden flashes of colour and noise. ‘What the—’ he’d said, looking up at the impressive fireworks display illuminating the night sky, a bank of grey smoke drifting high above them and carrying with it an acrid, sulphur smell.

She’d pulled him close again. ‘Bonfire Night,’ she’d said, her lips against his.

‘Aha,’ he’d grinned, ‘no chance I can convince you I just arranged that little display then, for our first date?’

She remembered how her stomach had flipped at his use of the word ‘first’, the subtle implication that there might be a second, perhaps even a third? She’d leaned in to test him and when they’d finally pulled apart again, it had felt like the most natural thing in the world to invite him back to her place.

They drive north for several hours, stopping once at a grotty service station to refuel and ask for directions, then navigate their way through an urban sprawl before breaking out into open countryside. Cultivated farmland slowly gives way to a more unruly landscape and they find themselves driving through tangled woods and across open, shrubby moors. Eventually, they pull up onto the verge of a remote country lane, the car’s hazard lights flashing urgently as they stare up a steep, unmarked track.

‘It’s got to be up there,’ says Lila, turning back to the map in her hands. ‘It’s the only place it can be. We’ve driven up and down this lane three times now.’

Tom shakes his head. ‘I don’t like it, Lila. It looks really narrow and muddy. After all that rain . . . what if the car gets bogged?’ He checks his phone. ‘I don’t even have mobile reception here.’

‘So we’re just going to turn around and go home?’

Tom doesn’t answer.

‘Come on,’ she says, surprised to find herself being the encouraging one, ‘we’ve got boots and coats. We’ll survive. It’s the Peak District, not Outer Mongolia.’ She regards him with a sideways glance; he has definitely grown more cautious in recent weeks.

He must feel her studying him because without turning, he pulls a silly face at the windscreen that makes her smile in spite of herself. ‘Come on,’ she says again, a little more softly, ‘we’ve come all this way; let’s not give up now.’

‘OK,’ he sighs, flicking off the hazard lights and swinging the car up the overgrown track, ‘but I’m warning you, it’s you that’s going to dig us out if we get stuck.’

‘Deal,’ she says and feels her grin creep across her face like a strange aberration. When was the last time she smiled?

In the early days, their relationship had been full of spontaneity and passion, born out of the intensity that a long-distance love affair can carry. Tom’s job had meant a fair bit of back and forth; he’d travelled to visit her in London whenever he could but when a project kept him in one place for a time, Lila would jump on trains or planes for illicit weekends in whichever city his work had taken him to. She’d loved the excitement of it all, the anonymous hotel rooms, the big white beds, the fluffy bathrobes and room service. It was a romantic way to start a relationship and the physicality of them – their ease with each other, the uncomplicated way they reached for one another, touched one another – seemed to form the very foundation of all that they shared.

Unlike other men she’d dated, Tom was a man who seemed consummately comfortable in his own skin. He communicated with his hands – and with his body; his fingers grazing the back of her neck, a hand resting lightly on her hip, an arm slung around her shoulders as they walked down the street. Whenever she thought of him in those early days it was always in a physical way – the curve of his bicep, the hollow of his collarbone, the early-morning stubble on his jaw – and it always evoked a tingle of lust.

They’d been together just over eighteen months when he proposed with an antique diamond ring in an intimate underground wine bar tucked down a one-way street off the Strand. She hadn’t had to think about it; she’d shrieked her ‘yes’ and leapt into his arms and six months later they were married before friends and family at a small register office, the reception held afterwards in a flapping white marquee at the bottom of her parents’ sprawling Buckinghamshire garden.

‘I promise we will never lose this,’ she’d said, pulling him close on their wedding night, and she’d thought of some of the other couples they were friends with who bickered and sniped publicly at each other, trying to draw the rest of them into their personal battles with jokey little barbs and asides designed to undermine or humiliate; and she thought of her parents, sitting there at the wedding breakfast, her father drunk on champagne and whisky, flirting outrageously with her maid of honour while her mother turned away from him with that sad, tight look upon her face. No, she’d thought, they would never be like that. They would never lose their closeness, their intimacy. They would never stop wanting each other.

‘And I promise,’ he had said, kissing her shoulder blade before trailing his lips all the way down to the crook of her elbow, ‘that we will never go to bed angry at each other. There is nothing we won’t resolve with a little compromise . . . or sex,’ and he had grinned his crooked grin at her and tumbled her back onto the bed.

‘Here it is,’ she says, studying the map and then glancing back up to where the track widens out in front of them. ‘This has got to be it.’ Tom looks doubtful but he parks the car by a rotting wooden gate and they pull on their walking boots and coats before clambering over it and out across a boggy meadow. Using the map to guide them, Lila leads them through a densely wooded area and then out onto a high ridge where bruise-coloured clouds hang ominously low all around them.

She holds the map out again, wrestles it flat against the wind, and tries to gain her bearings. She looks up and points. ‘I think it must be just over this ridge . . .’

Tom nods and eyes the darkening sky. ‘Let’s hope so because I think it’s about to bucket down again.’

As rain streaks from the leaden sky they run the last few hundred metres, across the ridge, around a huge clump of blackberry brambles and then down a grassy bank towards an expanse of water, slate grey and choppy with rain. There isn’t time to stop and take it all in; the rain lashes them, fierce and cold, stinging their skin. ‘Come on,’ yells Tom, but Lila can’t keep up. She loses her footing and slides down the rest of the bank on her bum, shrieking as cold water seeps through her jeans.

He hauls her up and points towards the pencil-grey outline of a building, just visible in the distance through the curtain of rain. ‘Over there,’ he says and they run again, arriving on the doorstep moments later, soaked to the skin and gasping for breath.

‘Is this it?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know.’

She eyes the darkened windows of the tumbledown cottage. ‘It’s got to be it, hasn’t it?’ Now that she’s here she’s suddenly nervous.

‘Try the door. Hurry.’

She pulls the silver key from her pocket and tries to turn it in the lock, but she is cold and wet and her hands are trembling. She can’t do it. ‘Maybe this isn’t it,’ she says. ‘Maybe we’ve got the wrong place.’

But Tom takes the key from her hand and tries again. Within seconds the door has swung open with an ominous creak. He holds it ajar for her, ushering her in, before following her into the shadowy interior and shutting the door behind them with a bang.

She turns to look at him through the gloom, both of them soaking wet and breathless. ‘We did it,’ she says and then she looks around, drinking in her first impression of the old place. ‘We’re here.’

Tom reaches across to flick a light switch on the wall – more from habit than expectation – but they are both amazed when the bare light bulb overhead flickers, fizzes and then stays on. ‘Electricity,’ he says, ‘well I never.’