Why Don’t You Come for Me (20 page)

‘But … you told me Shelley had gone away.’

‘And now she’s come back again.’

She had spluttered something, then, about being sorry or glad, or at any rate a combination of words which completely betrayed her embarrassment and confusion. Brian, unsurprisingly, had said nothing to help put her at her ease.

When she told Marcus that Shelley had returned home, he made a point of not being surprised, which stopped just short of saying ‘I told you so’.

In fact, she really did have things she wanted to ask Shelley about, particularly the Pre-Raphaelites, because the BBC had been advertising a forthcoming series about them and there was nothing like a TV tie-in to raise interest and awareness in a subject, but she dreaded the possibility that Brian might have told Shelley about their encounters at Booths, or worse still, how oddly she had behaved up at High Gilpin. Shelley would at best think her daffy and at worst, completely bonkers. Looking back now, the whole business made her feel both stupid and curiously ashamed of herself. Marcus had been right about her overreacting, and as well as being more than slightly annoying, this only served to encourage him in his sense that he was right about everything else, too. On the one hand she felt too embarrassed to drop in on Shelley, but on the other, she knew that the longer she left it the more awkward it would become.

Without the tour schedules to keep her busy, she had been spending more time than ever working with her sketch book, mostly out of doors. She had done a series of pen and ink drawings of sheep against a mountain background, which she thought as good as some little notelets she had seen on sale in Greenodd Post Office. There were other elements of her growing portfolio which she liked less, such as the fat-faced policemen, seashells and similar alien objects, which she sometimes spotted insouciantly lurking in the corners of landscapes, unconsciously pencilled into places where they did not belong.

There had been no other signs and portents since the arrival of the third shell. Every day she checked around the house, scanning the doorsteps and window sills, falling eagerly upon the mail. She studied the belt of woodland from the kitchen window several times a day, but although she sometimes thought she caught sight of a watcher standing among the trees, if she stared long enough it always transformed into a tree trunk, or a patch of shadow. Some days she felt as if she was inhabiting a world in which the edges of reality were blurring, like watercolours running into one another, except that she knew the shells were real. It was a rare day when she did not take them out of her drawer and slide her fingertips over them, committing every nuance of their texture to memory, as if more intimate knowledge would ultimately help her crack their code. She was sure that something else must happen soon.

She was careful not to say anything to Marcus about this sense of anticipation, instead allowing him to believe that she was working assiduously on the Lake Artists Tour and endeavouring to appear keen to discuss all other aspects of the business at every opportunity, an activity for which Marcus had never needed any encouragement. His conversation was peppered with: ‘Melissa says this,’ or ‘Melissa says that,’ or ‘Melissa’s had a great idea.’ She just adopted a fixed smile and said nothing. As if she couldn’t see that he was besotted with bloody Melissa. When he was not there, she actively tried not to think about the business, which in turn meant that she did not have to think about Melissa. Mostly she thought about Lauren. She had begun to think of her in a more positive, less painful way; to visualize her as the girl she would be now, a girl who would be coming home … soon.

Being at home enabled her to catch up on a variety of jobs, and during the May half-term, she decided it was the turn of the kitchen cupboards to get a thorough overhaul and clean. She started one morning with the wall cupboard nearest the kitchen door, unloading its contents on to the work surface so that she could wipe out the interior. The house was very quiet. She had not bothered to switch on the radio, and there was no sound from upstairs, where she assumed Sean was still in bed, although it was approaching noon.

As she rinsed her cleaning cloth at the sink, she pondered yet again how the shells had arrived on the doorstep and the window sill. Had someone crept along the lane with them, keeping low behind the walls, scurrying from one bit of cover to another? Probably nothing so obviously furtive than that. Around here it was not unusual to encounter walkers at any hour, sometimes even late at night. Several footpaths converged on Easter Bridge, since foot traffic down the ages had always needed to avail itself of the crossing. Dressing as a hiker would be the perfect cover for moving about on the public roads because no one looked twice so long as you had the regulation boots and rucksack. If anyone had happened to pass in a vehicle, or even look out of their window, the sight of someone striding along the road in hiking gear was just about as unremarkable as you could get – and it would take less than a minute to sneak down the drive to the house and back. You would have to be extremely unlucky to get spotted. It was not a comfortable thought, the idea of a shadowy figure creeping into the garden, then sliding away again, melting back into the Lakeland scenery. In an instant they would be an ordinary, anonymous person again, someone she might pass by without a second glance – they knowing perfectly well who she was, but she not recognizing them.

This image of a backpacker trekking up from the bridge changed into that of a young girl strolling along in the sunshine. A girl of roughly twelve years old, with long blonde hair – Lauren – Lauren as she would look now, walking up from the bridge … coming home. Jo’s eyes followed the vision up the lane. It disappeared now and again. behind the trees and shrubs, which were still pale with the spring colours which came late to the Lake District. Once or twice Jo thought she had lost it, but the figure kept on coming nearer, its progress steady and unhurried, just as it would be in real life.

Without realizing it, Jo began to grip the edge of the sink for support. It was really her. Lauren was walking up the lane, heading for The Hideaway just as surely as if she knew exactly where she had to come. Although her knees were all but giving way, she managed to run outside on to the drive. She tried to shout, but nothing came. Seemingly unaware of her, the girl continued to approach in the same unhurried way, like a ghost which inhabits its own parallel arc of time and place, seen by but unseeing of the living.

‘Lauren!’ Jo reached the gateway just as the girl drew level. ‘Lauren,’ she repeated, holding out her hands.

The girl shied like a startled foal, removing tiny headphones from her ears as she edged away. Jo was momentarily aware of a crackle of music, cut off as the girl’s fingers found the switch of something hidden under her jacket. She spoke warily, all the time keeping her eyes firmly fixed on Jo. ‘Sorry – did you want something? Are you OK?’ The voice was polite but nervous, slightly plummy.

Jo stared at the apparition. The sense of fairy-tale unreality which had carried her thus far was ebbing away.

‘Is there a problem?’ Gilda Iceton’s words swept down the lane like an audible storm warning. Jo automatically turned at the sound, to find that Gilda had appeared in the gateway of The Old Forge. Jo noticed for the first time that Gilda’s voice was quite plummy too.

‘I think this lady might be ill.’ The girl sidestepped neatly, putting herself further from Jo and closer to Gilda, who was now advancing in swift strides.

‘You go into the house, Becky. I’ll take care of Mrs Handley.’ It was a tone which, while not unkind, brooked no argument. As the girl headed up the lane, Gilda stepped nearer to Jo and spoke in a voice too low for the girl to hear. ‘You leave my daughter alone. I don’t want you anywhere near her. How dare you think you can try to terrorize her, the way you and your friends terrorized me.’

‘I wasn’t – I didn’t …’

Gilda had already taken Jo’s arm and begun to lead her towards The Hideaway. To any onlooker she might have appeared to be helping an unsteady neighbour back home, but it was an iron grip, the strength of which was not only surprising but painful, too.

‘Leave us alone,’ Gilda hissed in her ear. ‘Do you understand me? Just leave us alone.’ She steered Jo right back up the drive, only loosing her hold when they reached the kitchen door. Jo automatically reached up and rubbed her arm, which continued to throb as if Gilda’s fingers were still clamped into it. ‘Hurt you, have I?’ Gilda seemed to tower over her. Jo had forgotten how lanky Gilda had been at school; there she had been a thin, daddy-long-legs kind of figure, gangly-limbed, with a running style all of her own. She was carrying a good deal more weight now. ‘If you ever do anything to upset Becky, I swear I’ll hurt you so badly you may never recover.’

Jo opened her mouth to protest, but Gilda stalked away before she could say a word. When Jo called after her the other woman took no notice.

Gilda’s daughter. The girl was Gilda’s daughter. Wave after wave of disappointment swept over her. She stood outside the door for several minutes, rubbing her arm where Gilda had held her and gulping for air. If only Gilda had let her explain. Dear God, it was not as if she would have done the girl any harm. Surely even Gilda could see the difference between the kind of things one might get drawn into as a teenager and the kind of things one was capable of as an adult.

When she eventually re-entered the house, she had to sit at the kitchen table for a long time, trying to recover from the shaky feeling Gilda had engendered in her. Although she told herself that she had merely been confronted by the natural wrath of a mother protecting her young, there was something else she could not quantify. Perhaps it was no more than a primitive instinct telling her that people who appear different may be dangerous, an old, irrational prejudice against someone whose outward appearance is not quite right.

While she was still sitting at the table, Sean ambled downstairs and made straight for the fridge. If we live here long enough, Jo thought, he will erode a track: bedroom to fridge, then back to bedroom.

‘Good morning,’ she said, summoning an effort. ‘I’m just making tea.’ She would have preferred coffee, but she knew he didn’t drink it. ‘Would you like a cup?’

‘Yeah – thanks.’ His tone was cautious.

‘It’s a much better day, quite warm outside. Have you got any plans?’

‘I might go down to Harry’s later on.’

She allowed a pause to develop before saying casually, ‘I see the new girl who lives at The Old Forge is home for the holidays.’

‘Yeah. Her name’s Becky. She’s been playing with Charlie.’

At any other time Jo would probably have derived pleasure from such a breakthrough. Sean volunteering information in a conversational way without having it forced out of him was a red-letter event; but this morning she felt only frustration. It was evident that Sean had been aware of the girl who lived across the lane for a couple of days. If he had only said something about it earlier, she would have been alerted to the girl’s presence and much less likely to have made such a catastrophic error.

‘If you go to Harry’s,’ she said, ‘be sure to lock up after yourself and take a key. I might be going out later on.’

‘OK.’ Sean paused to examine the items she had removed from the cupboard, picking through them one by one. ‘Why is all this stuff out?’

‘I’m cleaning the cupboard.’

She was beset by the awful suspicion that he was reporting back to Marcus: ‘Nothing abnormal observed today, except that she’d taken everything out of a kitchen cupboard. She said she was cleaning, but I didn’t see any signs of it.’

After pouring the tea, she made haste to resume her spring-cleaning activities – dreadful, this idea of being under surveillance. However, once Sean had taken his bowl of Weetabix and mug of tea, she quickly wiped and dried the shelves and replaced the contents any old how, deciding that the time had come to cut and run. When she had changed into her outdoor clothes, she called out from the landing to tell Sean she was going and heard a muffled ‘OK’ in return. As she laced her boots, she noticed that her fingers were still trembling. She badly needed fresh air and some sun on her face, but in order to gain the fells, she would have to walk right through Easter Bridge, passing all the other houses, including The Old Forge, en route.

She set out briskly enough to make her heart rate quicken, looking neither to right nor left, trying to ignore the sensation which came from the certain knowledge that she was being observed – maybe by the ghosts in The Old Forge, or maybe by Gilda Iceton herself. Or perhaps by Sean, keeping a covert watch from an upstairs window, preparing his report on her movements for his father. Most certainly by Maisie Perry, if she was at home; possibly by the family who had rented the old farmhouse for the week, exhibiting their holidaymakers’ curiosity about the people who lived in the village, or perhaps even by Shelley and Brian, from the windows of the gallery. As she approached The Hollies, she saw Harry’s mother in the act of placing a knotted carrier bag into the wheelie bin. Harry’s mother had always been friendly, generally going out of her way to say ‘hello’, but Jo felt that she could not face a chat with anyone just at the moment, so she focused her eyes straight ahead to avoid seeing the other woman.

In the end, she did not go up on to the fells. She had been on the point of taking her favourite path up through the woods when she saw some of Mr Tyson’s highland cattle grazing in a field not far along the road, and she decided to sketch them instead. She stood at the stout wooden field gate, resting her drawing book on the top bar. One of the beasts obliged her by approaching to see what she was doing, giving her the benefit of its full-faced curiosity, coming so near that she could see the texture of its rough ginger fringe and tough pale horns. The big eyes stared at her unblinking while she struggled to capture the creature’s appeal, without falling into the traps marked cute or cartoonesque. When the beast eventually decided that she was not of any interest and moved off to resume feeding, she began to sketch the other animals, all of them presenting at slightly different angles and attitudes. Finally she roughed in the line of the hedgerow on the far side of the field, thinking that when she sat down with it at home, she might try to incorporate all these various elements into a composite drawing.