Laying the Ghost (15 page)

‘It would have to be a different village,’ Nell said. ‘We couldn’t have lunch in his local – suppose he walked in?’

She couldn’t help adding, in her head, ‘with someone’, as in wife, slinky girlfriend. He wouldn’t be with children. He’d been sure about that, always, always sure. Unless he’d embarked on serious therapy, it was very unlikely he’d have changed his mind there.

‘Of course we could! It’s a perfectly public place! Where’s your sense of adventure? There’s no point coming if we’re just going to have a quick shufti and go home again. I’ve come out looking forward to causing trouble!’

Nell, now driving through Henley, stopped at the town centre traffic lights and turned to look at her friend, ‘This isn’t
Thelma and Louise
, you know, Kate.
Trouble
isn’t what
we’re
here for. I knew I should have come on my own.’

Steve might have been a better bet to accompany her, it crossed her mind. Being an ex-detective, he would have been more confident than they were about a possible approach. He really could have gone and knocked on the door with some convincing pretence. He must have done it hundreds of times in his former working life. What was it they always used as an excuse on cop shows? That they could smell gas? Did Chadstock have gas? But she didn’t know him well enough for all that, and besides, he might take it that bit too far and inveigle his way in so he could check the fridge to see if the shelves were stacked with bagged-up human heads. Ed, though, he would have been good – quiet, reassuring and unquestioning. He would have been best.

Ridiculously, Nell felt close to tears. This was all a huge mistake. What exactly was she expecting, even if she did find Patrick, even if he was going to be happy to see her? She’d made her choice all those years ago. Nothing had changed – it was like digging up long-dead bones, expecting to see that they’d miraculously acquired flesh, new vitality. What was it Alex had said to her when he’d first started playing away with other women? He’d blamed her for being only a sixty per cent wife. ‘You and Patrick,’ he’d said, ‘you’ll never be a closed book.’ Well, if she was going to get on with the rest of her life without either Alex or Patrick, she had to shut that book right
now,
and firmly. She should have done it years ago.

As she drove past the sign that said ‘Chadstock’ Nell felt like sinking below the windscreen and keeping well out of sight. She pulled her scarf up over her hair and hunched her body over the wheel. Why were her sunglasses in the kitchen dresser drawer, just when she needed them?

‘Hey – you’re not going to make yourself invisible, you know,’ Kate commented, laughing. ‘He isn’t going to recognize you, is he, not after all this time.’

‘He might … though back then my hair was blonder and longer and I had a fringe. And I was twenty-three, thinner. But apart from that …’ She heard a slightly hysterical giggle. It didn’t sound at all like her, but it must have been. It wasn’t Kate.

‘And now you’ve got a Vic Beckham bob and multi-stripes like we all have at our age. Hey,’ Kate patted Nell’s arm. ‘Don’t worry. He’s a bloke. He definitely doesn’t wander the village lanes expecting every other woman to be his great lost love! But if you’re worried, go and lie down on the back seat next to Alvin and let me drive. I’ll report any sightings of tall, fair, once-gorgeous men of a certain age.’

Nell shook her head. ‘Not a chance! I wouldn’t trust you not to pull over and ask him directions or something! And I’m not lying on the seat next to your son – he’d rub banana and biscuit into my hair.’

‘Yes he would,’ Kate agreed fondly. ‘I have great hopes
for
Alvin. He loves messing about with food so dearly that I just know he’s going to be my own home-grown celebrity chef. Not only will he make a fortune but he’ll be able to feed me luscious delicacies in my old age. The other two haven’t got any practical talents, bogged down in studying law and finance – I’m pinning all my hopes on this little afterthought.’

The little afterthought, Nell could see in her rear-view mirror, was asleep with his head lolling sideways and a fine trickle of dribble about to drip from his pink chin. Soon he would be awake and hungry again, in need of a new nappy and some space to run about in. They’d have to be quick if they were to get this mission over and escape from the village. In Nell’s thinking, this language of subterfuge and secrecy was perfectly appropriate, but at the same time she could sense how ludicrous Patrick would probably find it. Or not. He might just be livid.

‘OK …’ Kate checked the map. ‘Water Lane is coming up on the right, past the post office. Or is it a Spar? Whatever happened to villages? They’ll end up all Tesco Extra and Starbucks, like Putney …’

Nell, her heart pounding, only half listened to Kate’s running commentary. She just about took in the pretty mix of old buildings, the cutesy roadside grass verges, protected by low white posts and linked chains. It was the sort of place where a
Midsomer Murder
would be set: an inhabitant, crazed by suddenly revived memories, would
run
amok in the graveyard and slaughter the keeper of the local archives to stop old secrets emerging.

‘And … OK, slow down, Nell, we’ll be in the river at this rate. Look … on the left … Yes – here it is: Hanbury Mews! Except … Stop the car, you’re going too far.’

‘I’m driving past it, Kate. I can’t just park in front of his door. And “except” what?’

She pulled up in front of a chandlery on the riverbank, beside a small marina and boatyard, and turned the car round on the towpath, facing back towards where Patrick lived. He could actually be there right now, just a hundred yards away. He might be listening to Led Zeppelin and painting; there could be another slender nineteen-year-old lying on his bed … Or he could be working in London, a faceless commuter, a completely different sort of person now. What was the least likely thing? Insurance broker. So
not
him, as Mimi would say.

‘Except it isn’t a mews – I thought it would be, you know, the regular sort, like in Kensington. Lots of old little cottage-things in a row. This is just one house, set back behind the lane.’

‘There must have been more at one time. Perhaps they fell down. OK, we’ll sneak up,’ Nell decided, edging the car along. Houses of varying vintage lined the lane. Some were clearly Tudor, some Georgian, others had add-ons of later years tacked to them. Many windows were bull’s-eye glass and a lot of the inside ledges held collections of
sundry
pottery items, like the back shelves of musty antique shops. You could almost smell chintz and dust. Older people’s homes. This didn’t look like Patrick’s sort of place at all. Among his decorative items of choice had been three massive sets of buffalo horns hung across the wall, flying-duck style, a tatty stuffed heron that was placed in the bedroom’s bay window, from where it oversaw the comings and goings of the neighbours, and, facing visitors as they came through the front door from the far end of the hallway, a life-size black and white poster of Syd Barrett, late of Pink Floyd, his favourite band.

The mews was tucked away up a broad alley off Water Lane. Nell parked behind a black Range Rover and looked along the alleyway to the house facing her. This had to be it: it was the only possibility and looked like something a child would draw – four windows, central door and small, overhanging porch. Nell couldn’t help looking up at the chimneys, one at each gable end, somehow expecting to see a row of circular white-cloud smoke puffs painted against the brilliant blue sky. The front door was adorned by a stained-glass pane in some sort of design. She couldn’t make out what it was from the car, but it was in vibrant shades of green, something abstract, and was a decider: this was definitely Patrick’s place. There was no wisteria, no clematis, no window boxes. Definitely no wishing well, plastic or otherwise. Just a tiny front space of
garden
with a low wall overhung with leggy lavender that should obviously have been pruned years before. It would never recover now and would gradually become thinner and drier, and its remaining leaves would crumble to curled-up flakes. She wondered if it still bothered even to flower. It probably struggled to produce a few blooms, against all odds. Apart from the dearth of flourishing plants, the building wasn’t a million miles from the one she’d envisaged.

‘It’s very pretty, or will be in summer,’ Kate commented. In the back of the car Alvin stirred. He grunted and shifted and, in the mirror, Nell watched his big brown eyes open and gaze straight at her, startled. He looked as if he was trying to remember who she was. Patrick would probably look at her in a similar way if he happened to come out of the house right this minute. She didn’t think he would, though. The house had an empty look about it, not as if it was neglected or uninhabited, just that right now it was silent, resting, inactive, savouring its solitude.

‘And it’s a fair size for one person,’ Kate was going on. ‘I wonder if he lives with someone? Was anyone listed?’

‘On the electoral roll? No. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t. She might be ineligible to vote.’

‘What? Like under eighteen?’ Kate laughed. ‘At his age? Men!’

‘No!’ Nell punched Kate’s arm. ‘I meant she might be from another country! Or might, I don’t know, be an
anarchist
or something.’ Or ‘she’ might be a lodger. Or a man. Suddenly, she didn’t want to think of him here alone. It was a family-size house; one person surely couldn’t fill it. Too many parts of it would be cold, forbidding. There could be rooms where nothing stirred for months. There might be a frozen scene, a Miss Havisham moment in there somewhere. It wasn’t a happy thought.

Kate opened the car door. ‘We really
have
to go and knock. Come on, I can’t resist, can you?’ She was climbing out.

‘NO! Kate, stay where you are,
please
.’ Nell reached across and hauled her back in. ‘I already feel I’ve intruded enough. This was too far, too much and I feel really bad – I should have just sent a card. If he ever finds out …’

Kate looked serious. ‘Something really dire happened with you two, didn’t it? You never did tell me why you split up. If doubts have been haunting you ever since, then why didn’t you just stay together? I’ve known you for ten years and you’ve never let on there was some big secret.’

‘That’s because there isn’t,’ Nell said, abruptly. ‘Nothing more than a romance from our youth that went wrong. Happens to almost everybody.’ She would tell Kate about it sometime soon. Just not today.

She started the car and looked down the road before pulling away. As she drove past the end of the mews, she caught sight of something on the wall of Patrick’s house. Attached to the wall, high up, was a hoop and net, a
basketball
net. Would a solitary, determinedly childless grown-up play basketball?

If she only knew it, Mimi was, right now, just a mile or two from her mother. The train rumbled fast over Brunel’s Moulsford railway bridge (which Mimi now knew to be a four-arch, twisted-brick structure) and on to the west. And just as Nell should not really have been snooping in Chadstock, this wasn’t where Mimi should have been. At this moment, the rest of her classmates were in school being asked their opinions on to what extent, if at all, Piggy was responsible for his own death in
Lord of the Flies
. In some ways she would have preferred to be with them. She was good at everything, schoolwise, but with English you really got a chance to use your brain, to think things through for yourself and to express these thoughts. You didn’t get a lot of that with other subjects: no one wanted you to speculate wildly about the outcome of a photosynthesis experiment in biology – you just learned the facts about it or didn’t learn them; end of.

‘Lucky it worked – it usually does. But we’d have got well fined and I don’t have enough for the fare,’ Joel told Mimi as they slid into a pair of seats at the back of the carriage close to the buffet car. The ticket inspector had passed Joel in the buffet queue and he’d told the man his father was ‘back there’ with his ticket. Luckily the inspector had better things to do with his time than walk back down
the
train to check out the story of one seemingly honest teenager. Mimi had hidden in the loo till Joel rapped on the door to tell her it was safe to come out.

‘He’ll come back again, when other people get on.’ Mimi hadn’t any money with her, either. The fare from Putney to Reading had wiped out all her cash supply. They’d blagged their way on to platform four at Reading to get this train, and the homeward journey was going to be another terrifying exercise in deception. Mimi wasn’t cut out for this, she decided. Having been pretty much spoiled and indulged by her father, she’d never so much as stolen a bottle of nail varnish from Superdrug.

‘No he won’t – this one doesn’t stop now till Bath and we’re getting off there.’

Joel had thought this through. Mimi admired his thoroughness but did wonder why she was there with him. He had this weird engineering obsession and people like him usually seemed content to enjoy their obsessions alone, not drag some half-interested party along with them – but then he thought she was as nutty as he was. He’d shown her Paddington station, now he was going to get excited about going through the Box Tunnel and on to Bath Spa station. This time he was going to show her how Brunel had managed to negotiate a railway into Bath without damaging the city’s stunning Regency infrastructure. ‘You won’t believe the system of bridges and viaducts. It just all fits in, totally,’ he’d said, with the kind
of
faraway look in his eyes that other boys only had when contemplating how good it would feel to be fronting a top band, or signing to Manchester United.

‘OK, now we’re going into the tunnel,’ Joel said, grabbing (oh, at last! Wow!) Mimi’s hand. ‘You have to listen! You go over points in here. You’d think it was just straight through, but since it was built it’s been added to, and a line leads off to what used to be a regional seat of government. There’s a secret network of huge bunkers and a depot in case of nuclear war.’