The String Diaries (2 page)

Dismissing it, needing to focus on Nate, Hannah turned back to the farmhouse. She opened the door and stepped into the kitchen. A cursory sweep with the torch revealed a large room with an uneven flagstone floor. An inglenook fireplace. A sofa and two chairs. Glass-fronted kitchen cabinets above dusty countertops. Two Welsh dressers: one displaying crockery, the other spilling over with paperback books, fishing reels, candles, seed packets, matches, a first-aid kit. A round table by the window. A doorway leading to an unlit hall.

Spotting a light switch on the nearest wall, Hannah toggled it. Dead. She remembered Nate telling her the place was too remote to be on the grid. There must be a generator in one of the outbuildings. It, and the electric lights, would have to wait.

Grabbing a box of matches, resting the Maglite on the floor beside her, she knelt by the fireplace. Someone had left logs and kindling stacked in the grate. In under a minute she had a fire going. She took two candles from the dresser and lit them, placing one on the table and another on the counter. She would light more later. Right now she had to get her husband inside.

Outside, the wind’s intensity had increased. Frozen air sluicing down from the mountains brought an aching chill. Ducking her head, Hannah hurried to the passenger side of the Discovery. She wrenched the door open.

Nate slumped inside, unconscious, skin as white as linen.

‘Hey!’ Slapping his face, she managed to rouse him. He lurched up in his seat, and she could see he was trying to focus, but his eyes were rolling in his head. ‘I’ve got you, Nate, OK? Don’t try to speak. It’s only a short walk. I’ve got a fire going. You’ll have to help me just for this next bit. I’m afraid it’s going to hurt a little.’

Hannah braced herself as somehow he managed to lean forward and topple out of the car into her arms. It took all her strength to stop him from falling to the ground, and all her resilience to ignore his scream. ‘Good. Good, Nate. That’s the hard part. Just a few steps more.’ Hannah cast a look back at her sleeping daughter.

Nine years old. How can this be happening to us?

‘Leah, sweetheart, I’ll come back for you.’ Hannah kicked the passenger door closed, shutting the girl inside, away from the storm.

Side by side, Nate’s arm around her shoulders, they managed to hobble to the kitchen, where the fire was already warming the room.

‘
“Sofa,
”
’ he slurred.

‘That’s where we’re heading.’ She eased him down on to it. Pushed a cushion under his head. Raised his legs. ‘I need to see under your shirt.’

Nate’s hands fell away from his sides. She opened his jacket and ripped his shirt open, scattering buttons. His torso glistened with blood.

Immediately, she saw the two puncture wounds, each an inch in length. One was just above his lowest rib. She couldn’t tell if his lung had been pierced, couldn’t remember from biology how far down the ribcage the lung extended. The second wound sat even lower, in his abdomen.

Hannah fetched the first-aid kit – a green plastic briefcase – from the dresser. Popping the catch, she threw open the lid, rummaging through its contents. She found wipes and quickly cleaned his wounds. Within a couple of seconds blood began to seep from them. At least it wasn’t flowing freely. Then again, he had lost so much already. Finding a bag of wound closure strips, she tried as best she could to tape him up. She placed dressing pads over the strips and bound them to his body with bandages, wrapping them tightly by passing the rolls underneath his spine.

It wouldn’t save him, she knew. Only professional medical care could do that now.

With a blanket from one of the armchairs, she covered him up. ‘Nate, stay awake, OK? We need to get some fluids into you.’

He nodded, whispered, ‘I love you.’

Saying goodbye.

Hannah turned away from him, wiping her eyes, unable to reply. At the sink, she found a glass and filled it with water. In one of the cupboards she found a packet of sugar and poured some into the glass, stirring it with a spoon. ‘Drink.’ She held it to his lips, lifting his head as he slurped it down.

He drank two more glassfuls before he indicated he’d had enough. Then he took a shallow breath. ‘Han . . . in the hall. Cupboard.’ His voice was so low she could barely hear him. ‘Gear . . . for the lake.’

‘What gear, Nate? What do you mean?’

‘Scuba.’

Hannah frowned, then his meaning hit her. She stepped into the dark hallway. Using the Maglite, she found the cupboard under the stairs. Inside, among coats, overalls and hats, stood a diving tank and regulator. She directed her beam at the chipped white cylinder. On its side in printed black letters:
Enriched Air NITROX
. In handwriting on a peeling sticker above this:
MOD 28M. 36%
O
2
. She rapped on the tank with her knuckles, tilted it. Full.

The enriched air would help him to breathe, allowing more oxygen to enter his system. It might just win them some time. Buoyed by her discovery, she dragged the tank into the kitchen, attached the regulator and pressed it into Nate’s mouth. ‘OK, you’re not going to win any fashion prizes, trust me. But keep breathing. Nice and slow.’

He was too weak to reply, but he held eye contact with her. Hannah felt a thousand things pass between them in that look. She took his hand. Squeezed it.

Inside the room, the crackle of the logs in the grate and the mechanical sucking of the regulator made the only sounds. Outside, the wind hurled fistfuls of raindrops against the windows.

Hannah got to her feet, took a deep breath and was just about to go outside to Leah when something heavy crashed against the front door of the farmhouse.

C
HAPTER
2

Balliol College, Oxford

1979

Charles Meredith asked himself two questions that July morning, as he made the drive from his Woodstock home to the Balliol College library. First, would the girl be there for a fourth morning in a row? Second, how much did it matter to him?

While he wouldn’t be able to answer his first question until he arrived on campus, the fact that he found himself navigating summer tourist traffic on a Saturday morning to find out suggested it mattered to him quite a bit.

The girl was both pig-headed and short-tempered – traits, Charles conceded, that he shared. Inevitably, it had led them to an entanglement. Yet as well as being pig-headed and short-tempered, the girl was also an enigma, a puzzle demanding his attention.

Her sudden appearance, crashing into his life like thunder in a restless sky, could hardly have come at a worse time. In less than six weeks he was due in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was to deliver a lecture to academia’s finest – and fiercest – scholars of early medieval history. Not only was that work incomplete, he had just discovered a weakness in the architecture of his central tenet so severe it threatened to bring the entire edifice crashing down.

Wednesday morning, he had arrived on the campus with his six-week deadline bearing down on him like Theseus’s Minotaur. Carrying a satchel of research papers, scribbled thoughts and books, he walked through Balliol’s library to his table near the wooden statue of St Catherine. It was the table Charles used every time he visited. From here, surrounded by printed works, he could look through the arched windows to the front quad, and could also see the portrait of George Abbot, former Canterbury Archbishop, and one of the forty-seven translators responsible for the King James Version.

Lately, Charles had discovered that the table was not the only one he
liked
to use; it had become the only one he
could
use. If he tried to place himself anywhere else in the building, at any other desk, he found his concentration ebbing, his temper fraying. At first he told himself he simply drew comfort from having St Catherine and old Abbot gazing down on him while he worked. It had – he now accepted – been a lie.

Like the precisely ordered shirts hanging in his wardrobe, the carefully stacked cutlery in his kitchen drawer, the tins of food meticulously arranged in his larder, the collection of flattened foil milk-bottle tops on his sill, the table represented another symptom, another warning sign, another encroachment of the compulsions beginning to haunt him. Charles had been embarrassed to discover that both colleagues and students had sensed his fixation and were content to indulge him, with the result that whenever he visited the library, at whatever time of day, he found the table empty and waiting for him. That was until Wednesday morning, when he discovered his squatter.

She was young. At least ten years his junior. When he arrived she had reference books scattered before her like the picked-over leavings of a carrion feast. It would, he thought, take her an age to pack up all her materials and move to another desk. Since he had left his house, a dozen new ideas and worries had occurred to him. He needed to commit them to paper before they evaporated. Charles felt a tic pulling at his right eye.

He made a show of opening his satchel and noisily removing documents and pens. The girl looked up at him, blinked, and returned to her book. This left him standing in the middle of the library, awkwardly clutching a sheaf of papers and a swinging satchel. He glanced around. Few other scholars were using the library at this hour. Certainly no other women. Balliol had only accepted its first female Fellow a few years earlier. The first intake of female undergraduates was not due to arrive until the Michaelmas term. That meant she was a visitor, rather than a member of the college.

He could see Pendlehurst working his way down the stacks, paper in hand, mouth moving wordlessly. The librarian spotted Charles, saw the girl occupying his table and elected to drift out of sight.

Charles felt his jaw clenching. He cleared his throat. Stared.

The girl had a long face, almost equine. Chocolate-brown eyes. Auburn hair tied back in a ponytail. Again, she looked up at him. Holding his gaze a moment longer this time, she raised a challenging eyebrow. When he didn’t respond – it was difficult to as his own eyebrows were already raised – she returned to her work, picking up a pencil and writing something down on her notepad. Charles glanced at the cover of her nearest book.

Gesta Hungarorum
.

‘Miss?’

She looked up. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry, you’re sitting in my seat. Can you move?’

She leaned back in the chair, considering him with a puzzled expression. When she spoke, her accent was French. ‘You are sorry?’

‘No, I’m not sorry.’ Charles hesitated, frowned. ‘I’m not sorry. I meant . . . Look, that’s my chair.’

‘This is your chair?’

‘Yes, at my table.’

‘Your table.’

He felt his fingers tightening around his papers. Tried to calm himself. ‘Look, it’s not a problem.’ He gestured around the library. ‘There are plenty of free tables.’

She followed his gaze. ‘Yes. The library is quite empty.’

He waited for her to say something else, or to begin packing her belongings. Then, appalled, he realised that she intended to do neither. Her eyes continued to examine him.

He smiled. Rather, he widened his mouth, exposing teeth. ‘I come in here every day. And I always sit at this table.’

‘It is a nice table.’

‘Yes.’

‘If I came here every day, I would want to sit here too.’

‘If you came here every day, you’d quickly discover that I am always to be found in that seat.’

Now she returned his smile. ‘Except today.’

Charles sucked in a breath, held it. Exhaled. He tried to ignore the muscle twitching in his cheek. ‘Indeed. Well, I don’t want to hold you up any longer, and I’d also like to get started please, so can you . . .’ He left the sentence hanging.

‘Can I what?’

He flapped his hand in the direction of the other chairs. ‘Just . . .’

‘Just what?’

‘Look. I gather you’re not a student of this college. So perhaps you don’t know who you’re talking to, but—’

‘I’ve a feeling I’m going to find out.’

‘I’m
Professor
Charles Meredith, and—’

‘And I am Nicole Dubois.’

‘Well . . . that’s wonderful.’ Charles paused, shook his head. ‘For God’s sake. Will you just get
out
of my seat?’

‘I think . . .’ She paused, tapping her pencil against her teeth. ‘No.’

The library opened at nine o’clock on weekdays during the summer. The next morning Charles intended to be there the minute the doors were unlocked. After leaving the campus the day before he had been so angry – so fixated on the fact that she had not yielded to him in what, after all, was a perfectly simple request – that he had been unable to concentrate all afternoon. As a result he was yet another day behind schedule.

Traffic delayed his arrival, meaning he did not reach the library until ten minutes after it had opened. Already vexed, he pushed through the door, marched past Pendlehurst and came across the girl, sitting in his seat, with her books spread out all over his desk in such a disorderly heap that they virtually screamed at him to be dusted, alphabetically sorted, straightened and stacked.

‘You!’

She glanced up and smiled, but the trace of ice in her expression was not lost on him. Her hair, he noticed, was in bunches today. ‘Good morning.’

‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped.

The girl – Nicole, he thought, her name was Nicole – indicated the spew of books with the palm of her hand. ‘The same as yesterday, you see? Reading. Writing.’

‘I have a lot of work to do today.’

‘Then I wish you well.’

Instantly, he felt his cheeks growing hot. She possessed an instinctive grasp of the exact turn of phrase, the most casually mocking manner, guaranteed to incense him. ‘You’re interfering with my work, jeopardising a critical deadline. I don’t know what it is you’re researching, but why don’t you take it somewhere else?’

She opened her mouth, considered his expression, hesitated. Then: ‘Go on. Say it.’

‘What?’

‘Please say it.’

‘Say what?’

‘Ask me if I know who I’m talking to.’

‘Look, I’ve had about—’

‘Go on. Ask me.’ She rummaged through her notes. ‘I wrote it down somewhere here.’

‘This is preposterous!’

‘Preposterous! Good word, Charles. Pre-pos-ter-ous.’ Nicole
rolled it slowly off her tongue, savouring each syllable. ‘What a lovely sound it makes.’ She indicated the rest of the room. ‘The library is almost empty. But you must sit here. And you call me preposterous. It’s ironic, no?’

‘Will you let me have my seat?’

‘OK, I’ll ask for you.’ She contorted her face into a grimace. ‘Nicole, do you know who you’re talking to?’ Now her expression relaxed. ‘Yes, a strange man whose Ph.D leads him to believe he owns Balliol College library.’

‘No it doesn’t.’

‘The arrogant and obsessional Professor Charles Meredith.’

‘How dare you!’

She raised her eyebrows. Charles stared at her, speechless. Then, with a sudden feeling of impotence so crippling that he could no longer hold her gaze, he turned to the nearest table and threw down his papers. He sat down. Searched for one of his documents. Spread it out before him. Found a pen and uncapped it. Hunched forward, feeling his ears burning, his hands shaking. Tried to concentrate. Found his eyes flickering over sentences and phrases, retaining nothing.

From the next table he heard a snort and glared up at the girl. She was shaking her head at him, openly displaying her amusement. Feeling the arteries in his neck beginning to throb, Charles stood, gathered up his belongings and marched down the aisle.

‘
À bientôt
,’ she called after him.

Outside the building, pacing back and forth, he urged himself to calm down. The Princeton lecture was thirty-seven days away. Theseus’s Minotaur was growing tusks and horns. He could not afford to lose another day of work.

After a minute of clenching and unclenching his fists, and casting baleful looks at the undergraduates hurrying past, Charles went back inside the building. He found Pendlehurst at a desk. Beckoning him over, he laid an arm around the man’s shoulders. ‘I’m going to need a key to get in early tomorrow, Pendlehurst,’ he said. ‘Lots on.’

Charles let himself into the library at eight o’clock the following morning, before the other scholars had arrived. He found his table blissfully unoccupied. Glancing up at the placid wooden face of St Catherine, giving old Abbot a silent nod, he sat down and opened his satchel. Removing its contents, he carefully stacked his books in a pile, largest at the bottom, smallest at the top, each volume precisely centred upon the one beneath it, making the beginnings of a pyramid. He selected a notebook and placed it in front of him, one handspan from the nearest desk edge and equidistant from each of its sides. From his case he removed three pens and a single pencil. He lined them up in a row above his notebook, the lettering of each instrument at a forty-five degree angle towards him.

Content with the arrangement of his tools, Charles let his eyes drift across the library, deciding where to begin. It proved difficult. However hard he tried to focus on the Princeton lecture, he found himself returning to the exact choice of words he would use when the girl arrived at opening time to claim the territory.

Nothing petulant. He would not demean himself. He required something subtle. Elegant. Something that underlined his ascendancy while demonstrating graciousness in victory.

The exact content of that sentence changed several times over the next hour, as he polished it, refined it, added and subtracted hidden subtexts.

By ten o’clock she still hadn’t appeared. By eleven, he persuaded himself that she was not coming. By quarter past eleven, he noted with dismay that he had produced no work all morning and had spent nearly three hours devising a pointlessly smug sentence to reel off to a girl he had met only twice. By midday he had wound himself into such a maelstrom of fury that he leaped up from the desk and scraped his papers back into his satchel. Deciding to abandon the campus altogether, he strode out of the library and crossed the street to where his car was parked.

The Jaguar – a silver E-Type Series 3 indulgence – was where he had left it in front of a brick wall. Now he discovered
that a dark green Hillman Hunter had parked horizontally behind
it. His vehicle was trapped against the wall.

Frowning, Charles approached. He bent to the driver’s side of the Hillman and peered through the window. No one sat inside. Nothing lay on the black vinyl seats that provided any clue to its owner. He rested his hand on the bonnet. It was warm, but it was also in the full glare of the midday sun. The car could just as easily have been here a minute as an hour. Searching around him he saw an elm tree, set back from the road and shading a patch of grass. Nicole Dubois was reclining against its trunk.

Sighing, Charles walked over. ‘Let me guess. That car,’ he said, pointing at the Hillman, ‘belongs to you.’

Nicole looked up at him, squinting in the sunlight. Her face remained impassive, her tone neutral. ‘Charles. What you did this morning was disappointing.’

‘What?’

‘It was ungracious, unbecoming, ungentlemanly. Rather than playing by the rules, you used the advantage of your position to get what you wanted. I am not impressed.’

He opened his mouth to protest and discovered with dismay that despite his morning rehearsing for their next clash, he was utterly unable to think of a retort. When she forced him, unexpectedly, to defend his behaviour of the last few days, he found he could not. Now that he was outside the sombre environment of the library, with the sun on his face, he was chagrined at just how irrational – how
ungracious
– he had been. And all over a table.