A Trick of the Mind
Read A Trick of the Mind Online
Authors: Penny Hancock
trick
of the
mind
Penny Hancock grew up in south-east London and then travelled extensively as a language teacher. She now lives near Cambridge with her husband. She has three children. Her
first novel,
Tideline
, was published to rave reviews and was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick in 2012.
Also by the same author:
Tideline
The Darkening Hour
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Penny Hancock, 2014
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Penny Hancock to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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London WC1X 8HB
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-47111-506-6
Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-47111-507-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-47111-509-7
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by Hewer Text Uk Ltd
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For Andy
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
April
What was I thinking about, as I drove down that winding country lane with its blue shadows dappling the road ahead? Of how hard it was to leave someone, I remember. Even when
you knew it was right. Loving a person, while needing to get away from them, was a paradox I couldn’t explain.
I felt an unexpected kind of sorrow, almost grief; anyway a hollow in my chest that ached, to be driving towards the sea without Finn. The image that kept coming to mind was of a limb,
deliberately cleaved from my body.
I was into deep Suffolk, with its ancient trees and lush foliage. Towering hedgerows were silhouetted against the twilit sky, topped with a haze of may blossom. Fresh green smells drifted in.
The road had been empty, apart from a solitary jogger I’d avoided on the verge when I’d first turned off the A road, cursing him for not wearing something Hi-vis. They thought you could
see them, these runners, even when the light was low. As it was now. It was what Finn called the magic hour, poised between day and night. A photographer’s favourite time.
I was grateful for Pepper, my neighbour’s Norfolk terrier. He filled the Finn-shaped space next to me. I had promised the old man I’d look after the dog while he had his heart op,
that I’d guard him with my life. When we’d set off I’d assumed the little dog would stay on the back seat with his chew – instead he had jumped into the front and had his
paws up on the dashboard to see where we were going. Was it even legal to have a dog in the front? I ruffled Pepper’s fur. His nose shot up, his eyes reflecting the soft light, full of
love.
I’d turned the music up. Beyoncé yelled that she didn’t want to be a broken-hearted girl. I could hear Finn saying, ‘How can you?’ – leaning over, tuning the
radio into something folky or traditional.
Proper
music. This weekend, for the first time since college I didn’t have to worry what he thought. I was taking control of my life at
last. I was free of a relationship that had been holding me back for years! My mood swung upwards again – I felt the way my class of five-year-olds must do when I opened the door of the
stuffy pre-fab at three thirty and they spilt out like crabs heading for the sea. Grateful for space and time to play, to stretch their limbs. To do what the hell they liked.
‘Ssshh, Pepper!’ He’d begun to bark when there was a clunk and a jolt and the car veered sideways.
‘Whoa!’ I said. ‘What was that?’
I slowed, my pulse racing, turned down my music and looked in the mirror. I could see nothing, only a bare branch, sliced off by the storms of last week, swinging over the tarmac. A few broken
twigs and thicker tree parts were strewn across the dark road. The impact had knocked Pepper onto the seat. He’d stopped yapping and now he wriggled onto his front. ‘You OK,
Pepper?’ He wagged his tail.
I glanced again in the mirror as I drove on, slowly, my heart thumping hard.
There were only shadows on the road behind me. Nothing, just the branch, a remnant of last week’s storms. It must have caught the left-hand wing mirror and slammed it so it was flat
against the door now. Yet my heartbeat quickened and the thoughts started up: ‘Turn the car round, go back, check you didn’t hit anyone.’
I
had
checked. It was just a branch.
‘You hit a person standing on the side of the road back there. Go back.’
Before, I’d have turned the car round. I’d have found a turning place, and I’d have driven back, my palms sweating, to the point where I believed I might have knocked someone
over, and there would be nothing there, no injured person, no crushed body. Reassured, I’d turn again and drive on. I had done it, to Finn’s amusement, even when there hadn’t been
a jolt – once when the wind had buffeted the car so it had rocked, another time when the lights changed to amber as I crossed a junction. The thought would enter my head that I’d hurt
someone, and I had to go back to check. But not any more, not now I was casting off old ways.
I continued, slowly. I leant forward, and scanned the road ahead for bends that were easy to miss in the near-darkness. Nothing was left of the sunset in my mirror but a smear of pink, low on
the horizon. Ahead, the bright rhombus thrown by my headlights picked out trees flaunting young leaves and reassigned them to darkness. I was used to London, where it was never dark, where traffic
lights and shops and streetlamps and the constant peal of police sirens kept you company. Here, there were so many bends in the road you couldn’t see round. Deep blue coppices you
couldn’t see into. Tricks of the light and shadows that looked like something else. But I would not let the little jolt take hold in my mind.
We were going through a village now, its houses lit up, the last one before we got to Southwold. I preferred being among houses. My heart rate slowed and I returned to my reverie.
‘You can’t plan your life the way you plan a lesson,’ Finn had said.
‘This is just a feeling, there is no plan, Finn.’
‘I love you, Ellie. What’s the point in destroying what we have?’
‘I need to move on. We were just kids when we got together. Things have changed . . .’
‘Is it this exhibition?’
‘Not just that.’
‘What? I need to know.’
I couldn’t say it. That his love, his tolerance, had begun to rein me back. I had to free myself if I was ever to change, become the person I was capable of being. We were almost through
our twenties, it would be too late, other people had established themselves in their careers, won prizes, got there. I’d been coasting – accepting a status quo I knew didn’t make
me happy – for too long.
Now things were happening for me at last.
A gallery in May’s town was holding a show of artists in aid of the charity Mind and the paintings I had submitted had been accepted. It was an up-market gallery that only accepted
high-calibre artists. I felt a frisson of excitement again at what all this meant for me. And so I’d invited friends, we were going to spend the weekend in my Aunty May’s house by the
sea, walking, eating, going to the Private View on Saturday night.
The air coming in the window had changed texture now to something sharper as we entered the town and drove past the familiar shop fronts – the fish and chip shop, George’s antiques,
Adnams wine cellar – and I was turning off down a lane where flint-walled cottages lined the pavements, and the faint waft of wood smoke mixed with the tang of the sea.
I turned right and the buildings fell away and I drove over the golf course, the wind buffeting the car.
‘Nearly there, Peps.’
Past the water tower, a solitary circular building black against the sky, and at last over the humpback bridge. Left on the unmade track past the Harbour Inn and the black ramshackle fishing
huts and jetties along the estuary, bumping over things on the track: rope, or nets, and stones. I looked past the tilted black masts of boats. Nothing beyond but the North Sea and the vast sky
that symbolised my future – open, limitless.
Left at the end, and then I turned sharply right onto the shingle track, rattling over rough ground, finally pulling up outside my Aunty May’s cottage, so familiar, the sight of it sent me
plummeting back into my childhood.
It was like coming home.
The house was in darkness, of course. It stood, its back to the road, its broad low form staring across the dunes and further out, to the sea. I sat, wanting to relish the moment. The first time
I’d come here alone since my aunt died. Without Finn, I was able to sense everything.
The past within the present.
Appreciation that Aunty May had left
me
her house.
The strong bond my aunt and I had always shared.
It all gathered around me, filling me with warmth, and a sense of completeness. This was where I belonged. I knew at last what it meant that my aunt had left me her house, it was the passing of
the baton – she wanted me to take the house forward, to bring life back into it, to fill it.
I clipped on Pepper’s lead and we got out. Silver breakers were just visible smashing on the sand a couple of hundred metres down the beach. The wind slammed into me as I came round the
car. I stumbled against the bonnet, bruising my hip.
‘Shit!’
Pepper was tugging at the lead, begging me to let him run about. His fur blew upright so he yelped in surprise. I picked him up and kissed his ears. ‘Sorry, Peps, I can’t let you off
the lead. Do a wee and we’ll go indoors.’
I adjusted the wing mirror, congratulating myself again for resisting the urge to turn back after the tree caught the car. And I was buoyed by the same sense of joyful anticipation I’d
felt when I arrived here as a child.
CHAPTER TWO
I tapped the gatepost three times without thinking, a lifetime’s habit. A second’s apprehension as I slotted the huge key into the lock and pushed open the door
onto the darkness inside. The house smelt, as usual, of mildew, and my feet slipped on the sand that always coated the floors with a fine gritty layer. It got in somehow, even when the house was
locked, through minute cracks, or under the door. I flicked on the lights. I went through to the kitchen, dumped my bags, Pepper at my heels. I turned on the immersion heater, switched on the
fridge. I would warm up the place, turn it back into a home.