Drawing the Line (12 page)

‘Georgian. Definitely Georgian,’ Griff declared, looking over my shoulder at the page I was pointing at. He’d got the idea that after the adventures during the night I must be an invalid and cosseted accordingly. We never opened the shop on Monday, so there was nothing to stop him pampering me.

I hadn’t quite taken to the day bed in a decline, smelling salts at the ready, but Monday morning had brought thick, rain-filled cloud and it was too dark in the cottage to work without lights. So I agreed that a quiet morning reading, including some of those stately home guides, might be nice. Griff had found from somewhere a Victorian Paisley shawl in case I needed swathing. Then he’d found a couple of books on English vernacular architecture (“Everyday stuff, dear heart, not your posh palaces”) and was playing a little game of spot the period, opening pages at random, covering the caption and saying which period the house had been built in. I hadn’t the heart to tell him that all I really wanted was for him to push off to the bank and get rid of the money we’d picked up yesterday before Burglar Bill paid us another random visit. I knew a good proportion of our loot would never find its way into any official vault – that was why we discounted for cash. But he had to stash away enough to convince the taxman that everything was more or less above board.

‘Listen,’ I said firmly, getting up to follow him to the van, ‘remember you’re to take a different route to the bank from last week. Maybe a different branch altogether – why not Tenterden, rather than Ashford? You
could pop in and have lunch with Aidan.’

‘But that would mean leaving you on your own, dear heart.’

‘And if you went to Tenterden you could pop into Waitrose.’ That would get rid of some more cash. A lot. Griff loved a good spend on food when he was flush.

He beamed. I could never understand why but Griff had a passion for Waitrose that no other supermarket approached. ‘Pass me the shopping bags, then.’

No, he wouldn’t ever condescend to use check-out polythene carriers, and with the number you saw flapping in otherwise lovely hedgerows round here I suppose he was right. I nipped back inside for the heavy plasticised cloth ones we use, and a wicker basket that always gave him special pleasure.

I locked up the garage and the gate carefully behind him, and, as usual, locked myself into the house. There. Special treat day for me, too. Bother reading. I’d clean the bathroom. Griff always worried when I did housework. Hating it himself, he couldn’t understand that anyone would find it satisfying to achieve gleaming enamel and beautifully buffed taps. We’d still got
old-fashioned
tiles on the floor, too, and restoring them to pristine black and white gave me another thrill. Thoroughly exhilarated, I turned my attention to the kitchen. Griff was a wonderful cook but not the best mopper-upper in the world, so the Aga wasn’t looking its best.

After that, coffee made with some of the milk Tony had given us, it was time to open those books again.

And close them promptly. Thinking about Tony had reminded me of last night again. No, I wasn’t upset. I
was intrigued. True, the CCTV hadn’t shown up much when we’d had the intruder, but what if it had seen anything that had happened in the street. We’d paid extra for one that wasn’t fixed but would scan in response to movement. I’d moved enough. Would it have recorded anything that Tony’s mates could use?

It was the work of seconds to fish the cassette out, replacing it immediately with a new one. It took a bit longer to locate the precise footage, but at last I had a grand view of my bum as I bent down to pour away the milk. The figure of my assailant was less clear. To the naked eye there was nothing that might give a clue as to its identity. No, his. It was a male, I’d swear to that. But that was all. I hadn’t a clue about age or anything. Not after eight, maybe ten viewings. You’d need the sort of enhancement Tony had spoken about. And yet – and yet…

The more I told myself there might be something familiar about the figure, the less I knew what it was. In the end I did what I sometimes did when I was in what Griff called my divvy-mode. I walked away and concentrated on something else. In this case, those guide books.

Ruthlessly weeding out anything not in Kent or Sussex, for the time being at least, I looked at the National Trust properties first. And was ready to give up. Most properties were castles, and my memory certainly wasn’t of great thick walls and moats. A child would remember a moat and a drawbridge, surely? Far more than an old book? Lovely as Bodiam Castle and Ightham Mote might be, they were no use to me. What about houses? Bateman’s? Chartwell? No, they’d been
lived in by such famous people I’d surely have recognised a face. What about some others? Knole? No, according to the handbook it hadn’t been altered since Elizabethan times. All the same, I marked it down for a visit, it looked so wonderful. After all, I’d stumped up for membership and there was no point in cutting off my nose to spite my face.

What about English Heritage properties? Griff had found me a 1990 handbook, assuming that not enough would have changed in the castle world to justify rooting out a new one. And castles there were – nothing but castles, apart from the odd chapel or fort. Didn’t Kent have any eighteenth-century mansions, for goodness’ sake?

I didn’t know what to do. Or what to feel. What should I be feeling after raising my hopes so high, only to have them dashed? I wanted to cry, but it felt as if I was angry, not upset. Angry because someone had led me up the garden path – the Garden of England path, I added, furious, but smiling with grim amusement. Was that what Griff meant by a sardonic smile? I’d have to ask. I had no one to blame for my raised hopes but myself. But I was angry with Marcus for having suggested limiting myself to the immediate area. Like last night, I wanted to smash something. I was powerless in the face of all these grand buildings owned by old families and national institutions. First I hurled all the books across the room. Then I hit my temples with my clenched fists. There had to be an answer somewhere. I slapped my face to stop myself being so stupid. If only the pain in my face would numb out the pain in my head. I thumped again, like a boxer pummelling a hated
opponent.

I found blood on a knuckle.

Mine.

My God, Griff! What would Griff think when he came back and saw me like this? I got to the kitchen so quickly I didn’t remember moving. Cold water, plenty of it. Then I remembered the ice for Griff’s gin. Ice’d be even better. In a tea towel. Two tea towels, one for each eye. There. And don’t forget to refill the little plastic trays. He mustn’t know. It’d upset him so much. I was angry with myself, furious. I slapped again. Left, right; left, right. Both together. At least it was slapping, not punching. But I must stop. I mustn’t let him know I’d let him down.

Was that the only reason he mustn’t know? Or was there another, that I was secretly ashamed? A woman my age shouldn’t have temper tantrums, should she? Yes: foster mother number three, or maybe number four, had been spot on – I was wrong in the head and ought to be put away for my own safety.

Damn that. And damn everything else she’d ever said. At the time it had only made me worse. But it wasn’t going to now. I was a grown woman earning my own living and trying to dry out an old soak who was better than all the foster parents in the world, even Iris. Griff would be proud of me one day. One day I’d be proud of me.

There. That was better. Back in the living room I peered at myself in one of the mirrors in the chiffonier. I looked as if I’d had a damned good cry – come to think of it, I had, too – but my cheekbones and brows weren’t too bad. Yet. The trickle of blood from my swollen nose
was dwindling to a halt.

Picking up the books reminded me of my bleak joke about being lead up the Garden of England path. Another idea formed, slowly, like when an icicle just starts to melt and you see a drop of water gathering on the tip, taking ages before it finally drops. The Internet. I’d bet all the takings from the Worcester vase – hadn’t Griff been proud of me! – that there’d be something about Kent’s stately homes on a website.

The trouble with truanting – not to mention being shunted to about eight different schools according to where my latest lot of foster parents lived – was that I was missing great chunks of information that everyone else took for granted. IT had been a complete mystery, mobile phones excluded, until Griff took me in hand. Even now people thought it odd that a man of his age should be so much more at home on the Web than I was.

I no longer felt scared when I switched on his computer in case I blew something up, but this was the first time I’d ever searched for something myself. I know: it’s embarrassing, isn’t it? All the same, I was shaking, winding my legs round each other as I squirmed round in the big executive leather chair I always teased Griff about.

I always teased him about his service provider, too.

‘Don’t tell me, dear heart. Such good fortune they’re efficient and I’ve no desire to leave. You may think that [email protected] is amusing. But imagine moving to AOL and having to tell everyone I’m no longer a Virgin.’

It didn’t hurt too much to grin at the memory. When I’d checked out Kent I’d have another session with ice.

And there it was, the website of Kent, the Garden of
England. It told me to explore, discover, experience and relax. Well, I couldn’t have put it better myself. Scared, still, but with more and more confidence, I worked through what they had to offer.

The castles they offered first of all were agonisingly predictable. Leeds, Hever, Dover. So I couldn’t hurt myself again, I sat on the fist that wasn’t using the mouse and ploughed on. Would I like to organise my own tour? Yes, please. I typed in Stately Homes and got a list. Hell! Since when had Mount Ephraim Gardens and Sittingbourne Heritage Museum been stately homes? But I moved slowly down. Yes. Higham Hall. That was a genuine stately. But I’d been there a dozen times with Griff to the antiques fairs they held there. And I’d met the owners, manfully trying to rescue what had been an almost derelict house and transforming it into the most beautiful home. Except it wasn’t manfully. It was womanfully. No unknown fathers there.

I scrolled down further. An A to Z of very nice piles indeed. All were still family-owned, and most had very restricted opening times compared with Trust or Heritage-owned places. Well, if you were actually living in your own house you’d want to make sure you’d cleaned the loos before Joe Public went poking round. With all this success, I dared print off a list. Yo, Lina!

I was so chuffed I finished the rest of the housework, doing the living room and bedrooms, which I never enjoyed as much. I don’t know why, because in the normal run of things I love handling the china and glass that make the cottage such a pleasure to live in. Maybe it’s because I like a good uninterrupted run at things. By
lunchtime there was also a load chuntering in the washing machine: it’d dry on racks in the garage if the weather didn’t improve. The only thing I couldn’t do was have any lunch, because of course we’d run down our supplies of fresh stuff and Griff wasn’t home yet.

Bredeham wasn’t the prettiest of villages. True, there were some white-painted Kent boarded houses and cottages like ours, and a couple of black and white and thatched jobs, but generally speaking the houses were pretty undistinguished Victorian two-up-two-downs or some very ordinary 1930’s semis. But the nice thing about it was that you couldn’t walk down the street without seeing someone you ought to wave at if not actually stop and talk to. It could take Griff up to an hour to pick up his pension. I didn’t know that many people yet, but there was still Mrs Bourne to flap a hand at, and her dog to fend off. The weird thing was that when I first came I was afraid. I felt it wasn’t my street to walk down, that I needed permission. I had no right to be there. Trespassing, that’s it. The first few times I found an excuse for Griff to come with me I was so scared. No, it wasn’t anything to do with the villagers, because I’ve had the same feeling in other places. The first time I went into Canterbury Cathedral, for instance. Or the first theatre Griff took me to. Just like when I was in Oxford the other week, as if lowlife like me had no place on the pavement trodden by superior mortals.

Oxford! That was it. That was where I’d seen a man with a walk like the man’s captured on video. Dan Freeman. The don who’d got me into the Bodleian. I clapped a hand to my cheek in disbelief that I could be
so thick. The slap hurt. Oh, God! My bruises!

Fortunately Bredeham was big enough to run not just to a pub and a village shop (even if it was a Londis) and post office, but also a butcher (he also sold Griff’s favourite cheeses) a dentist (one day a week), a doctor (early afternoon everyday) and a chemist, which happened to double as a stationer and bookstore.

‘Hello, Lina,’ Mr Elworthy greeted me through the little dispensary hatch behind the counter. ‘Won’t be a second! How’s Griff? Those tablets working?’

No, it wasn’t the place I’d have gone to buy condoms or if I’d had to take the morning-after pill. Especially as within thirty seconds of his emerging from the dispensary he was round the counter peering at my face, first through his glasses, then with his specs in his hand.

‘A drawer,’ I said flatly. It felt strange to be resorting to downright lies again. OK, I used half-truths very, very occasionally in the trade, but nothing blatant like this. ‘I thought I’d spruce up this chest of drawers while Griff was out. It had stuck – you know what old furniture’s like – and I gave it all I’d got. And it came out like a shot. I’ve iced it, but you can’t walk along the street with a dripping tea-towel pressed to your nose!’ I grinned.

‘Drawer, eh?’

I nodded. ‘Plus my fists.’ I mimed putting my hands side by side on an imaginary handle.

‘Lose consciousness?’

‘Just a bit of blood from my nose. But I’ve got plenty to spare!’

‘In that case you’ll be pleased to hear there’s a
blood-donor
session next week. On the village green.’