The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (17 page)

‘I can’t imagine he did,’ Mrs Anderson replied. ‘Though . . .’ She’d waited long enough. The time had come to tell Violet.

‘What?’

‘It’s one matter keeping her things if he could make use of them . . .’ She glanced at Violet letting her see her distaste, watching for her reaction. ‘But her clothes, the hat and bag, what would he want with those?’

‘What hat and bag?’

‘The ones that came ashore, the ones Duncan said he found in North Bay.’

‘He’s got
those
.’

‘Yes, that’s what I mean.’

‘How?’

‘The police didn’t need them anymore, once they’d
decided
on suicide.’ Mrs Anderson loaded ‘decided’ with cynicism. ‘Megan didn’t have any next of kin so they brought the hat and bag to Brae – they knew Mr William was the father of the child Megan had been carrying. Diana answered the door. I don’t think she ever told Mr William about it, but she took the hat and bag and gave them to Duncan with all of Megan’s other possessions.’

Violet stared at her. ‘He’s still got them?’

‘I don’t know, but I imagine so.’ She paused and looked at Violet. ‘According to people in the village,’ she continued hesitantly, ‘he keeps a room upstairs in her memory. Her things are there. Apparently some boys were in the house for a dare and they found the room . . . all neat and tidy.’ Mrs Anderson sniffed. ‘The only part of the house that is, I dare say.’

Violet put down her napkin, said ‘excuse me’ and hurried to the door.

The last time Violet had been in Mrs Anderson’s house, she had been a tiny baby, her face screwed up and crying, blood smeared on her, and on Diana. ‘So much blood,’ Mrs Anderson said quietly as Violet ran along the track beside the walled garden.

The clap and clatter of pigeon wings resonated around the courtyard. The birds had burst from a broken skylight and were flying in frantic loops and circles above Violet’s head. ‘Mr Boyd. It’s Violet.’ She spun around, directing her shouts at one side of the steading, then at another. ‘Duncan . . . Mr Boyd.’

‘Where are you?’ she said.

Meeting him, he’d seemed so guileless, a ‘poor soul’ as her friend Hilary might say. Harmless, Violet had thought, even sweet in his way. Looking about her, at the dereliction and disarray, she questioned why a man like Duncan Boyd had kept her mother’s clothes and possessions for 26 years; what he wanted with them, what seedy purpose. Like a chill, the atmosphere of the steading seeped into her bones and made her think its owner capable of anything, even murder. The place was sinister, she decided, and so was the man who brought it to such a state of ruination. Like Poltown, she thought, where nothing was what it seemed.

‘Where are you?’ she said again as though she was playing hide and seek with a malevolent child. She backed across the yard towards the farmhouse door. It was ajar. ‘Duncan?’ she inquired into the gap between door and jamb and stepped away, as if expecting him to jump out and surprise her.

She jumped instead, in anticipation.

‘Where are you?’ she asked again softly, the sound of her voice keeping her companion.

‘Hello.’ Her knuckles rapped on the wood of the door. ‘Duncan. It’s Violet. Are you there?’

She pushed open the door and went inside.

The smell was what assailed her first – cats – and then the mess. She cupped a hand over her nose to stop herself gagging and picked her way across the porch. The floor was strewn with old and muddy boots of all kinds and lined with scuffed newspapers on which were three chipped enamel plates covered with stale and smelly scraps of food. A black and white cat was lying on an old kitchen chair. It watched her, blinked and started to purr as Violet disappeared into the gloom of a passageway. She took a deep breath. Stale air: it tasted of decay and dustiness. She imagined white bones. ‘I love you Anna,’ she whispered, wishing she was back in Glasgow with her daughter, wishing she was anywhere but here.

She emerged into a rectangular hallway, slowly, a step at a time, letting the passageway provide cover and the prospect of escape until she was sure she was alone. She looked at the chipped flagstone floor, at broken lumps of plaster scattered across it, at the peeling and cratered walls, the cracked ceiling, at the stairs to her right.

Mrs Anderson had said the room was upstairs.

She crossed the hall and climbed them two
at a time. At the top, she experienced something approaching
exhilaration. Across the landing, against the far wall, under a
faded watercolour of a fishing boat on a stormy sea,
was a chest of drawers. Violet glanced to its left,
at the closed door.

A name was stencilled on it. Megan.

She gasped.

Until then, her mother’s name had belonged in the past – in the conversations Violet had had, in the yellowing newspaper cuttings given to her by Mr Anwar. Seeing it on the door was the first time she’d encountered it in the present. How hope waited for just such a thing, how quick it was to flare.

She had to remind herself,
she’s dead, she’
s dead, she’s dead,
and crossed the landing to the unpainted wooden door. Cracks ran up and down the grain and one was wide enough for Violet to see daylight through it and to feel the faintest puff of fresh air on her cheek. Turning the knob, the door swung open onto a tidy and well-furnished room. What would be normal and unremarkable in any other house was a shock among the chaos of Boyd’s Farm. Violet stood in the doorway transfixed, her eyes skipping from one item of furniture to the next. Pretty floral curtains flapped in the draught from an open window. Below, there was a mahogany dressing table, bleached by the sun on which were laid out a hair brush, hand mirror, scent and nail varnish bottles as well as an open box of tissues. To the left of the dressing table was a wardrobe, and on the opposite wall an iron bed-stead with a patterned cover. A teddy bear reclined against the bulge of a pillow. A book was on the bedside table. A fabric book-mark extended from its pages. Was it hers? ‘She’s dead,’ Violet repeated. Everything in the room suggested otherwise, that her mother had gone out but would soon be coming back.

After stepping inside, she shut the door quietly but grabbed at the handle as soon as she’d let it go because she had to support herself on something. Behind the door was a cot, its mattress sealed in the manufacturer’s polythene wrapping. A large brown paper parcel tied with string rested against the headboard. Someone had written across it ‘for baby’. Violet reached for the side of the cot. Her fingers slid over the tail board to the side rail. Then she touched the parcel again before lifting it and putting it on the bare planks of the floor and kneeling beside it. Instead of wasting time undoing the knot, she slipped off the string and exposed the dark brown of the paper which it had covered. The remainder was bleached and pale, indicating how long ago it had been wrapped, how long it had been there. After peeling away three layers of paper, Violet laid the contents around her: six old-fashioned cotton nappies, two sleep suits, two white cot sheets. Everything in white, she imagined, because when her mother bought them she hadn’t known whether her baby would be a boy or a girl.

Looking under the cot, Violet found an upturned baby bath and a nappy bucket.

She stared about her, her face set in an expression of puzzlement, her fingers kneading the soft fabric of the sleep suits. She was looking for an explanation for this room and why it was clean and aired, the bed made, everything neat, tidy and welcoming, as though Megan Bates lived there. Why, Violet asked again, when the rest of the house was falling down?

She got to her feet, approached the wardrobe and turned the key. The dark-wood doors opened together. Violet let them swing wide on their hinges. On the left was a series of drawers with half-moon hand holds; on the right, a rail on which hung a modest collection of dresses and jackets. She was surprised by how few there were, and by their muted colours, a mixture of creams, greens and browns. Not only had she expected her mother’s wardrobe, if that was what it was, to be full to bursting but also for her to have a collection of brightly coloured clothes to match her reputation. Violet’s impression of her mother had been formed by snatches of information – the white dress and the sun hat she had worn the day she disappeared and the eye-witness’s comment to the police about her being sure it was Megan Bates because ‘ no-one else wears summer dresses in Poltown’. Neither of these suggested to Violet that her mother had been anything other than showy.

What was in the wardrobe lent a different impression and left Violet confused as well as ashamed of her previous rush to judgement.

She touched a dress, then another and another until she had stroked them all, her fingers sampling the fabrics, this one silk, that cotton, another wool. From habit she registered which was which, though her thoughts were on another attribute of these clothes, how once they would have touched her mother’s skin, how her fingers were a slither of fabric away, how it was as close as she would ever come to her flesh and blood.

She lifted out a cream silk dress. The style, like the colour, was restrained: a full skirt and a high buttoned neck. Violet held it against her, trying to imagine her mother wearing it, looking in the mirror on the back of the wardrobe door to see whether it suited her too, whether it fitted. She checked the label before returning it to the wardrobe. It was size 10, and the discovery led Violet to examine the labels of the other skirts and dresses. Apart from two maternity dresses which she uncovered in the search, her mother’s clothes were Violet’s size.

Having entered the room imagining mother and daughter to be different from each other, she found with every discovery her opinion moderating until she arrived at the conclusion that, perhaps, they weren’t dissimilar after all. A voice warned her of the emotional danger of veering from one impression to another on such flimsy evidence. But despite its cautionary effect, Violet experienced a deep-seated and, under the circumstances, odd sensation; one which was close to happiness. In every child there was a desire to belong: in Violet’s case it had stayed into adulthood.

She let her hand run along the clothes, feeling again the different textures, the hangers knocking against each other on the rail, before turning to the part of the wardrobe which had drawers. She removed shirts and cardigans, finding folded away jeans and underwear, none of it immodest or lacy, and she experienced another shift in her emotions, to anger. She was hurt for her mother whose mistake had been to fall for a married man and to have become pregnant by him, and to have lived on the fringes of a small community which had an appetite for gossip.

She wandered over to the bed, touched the teddy bear and noticed the slight wear around its ears and nose. She speculated on its age, whether it would have been her mother’s companion from childhood, whether it would have been in worse condition if it had been. She glanced at the bedside table, at the book there. As with everything else she’d seen, her preference was to observe and only afterwards to touch, to acclimatise herself to her mother’s possessions a sense at a time. The book’s title, written in ornate gold lettering, was
The Far Pavilions
by M.M. Kaye. Violet had heard of it but hadn’t read it. The illustration gave the impression of it being an eastern romance, accurately as Violet discovered when she read the cover blurb: ‘The famous story of love and war in nineteenth-century India – now a sumptuous screen production.’ She opened it at the book-mark which had been left on page 564, the start of chapter 39. She scanned the text before turning back a page and reading the last three paragraphs of the previous chapter and wondering if they had been the last her mother had read. Another impression of her mother formed, of a woman with a romantic streak, who chose to live in isolation. Why?

Violet crossed to the dressing table and sat at the stool. She picked up the hand-mirror and watched her reflection, imagining her mother doing the same. She examined the bristles of her mother’s hair brush, looking for stray hairs, disappointed to discover there weren’t any. Next, she investigated one of the dressing table’s two drawers, observed the tidy array of jars, tubes and bottles, before opening the other. It contained a hair dryer, and tortoise- shell hair clips. For a time she was distracted, looking around the room. Then she stood on the stool and felt along the top of the wardrobe. It wasn’t level as she’d thought but recessed. Her fingers touched what felt like a cardboard box. She lifted it down and put it on the bed before getting back on the stool. Reaching up again she found another box, bigger and squarer than the first. Placing it on the bed beside its companion she noticed how little dust there was on them. Either Duncan must have put them on the wardrobe recently or else he must take them down regularly to clean them.

She took a deep breath.

The lid of the bigger box slid off easily. Inside was a raffia sun-hat. It had a red ribbon tied around its broad rim. In places, where the ribbon was stained with water marks, the red had turned to pink streaked with brown. Violet removed the other lid. Lying in that box was a leather shoulder bag, the strap still attached, the leather blackened and cracked.

All she could think about now was Megan dying and these
objects
surviving. She lashed out at the lids, the boxes and their contents sending them hurtling from the bed and crashing on to the floor.

Afterwards, shocked at what she had done, she stared at the boxes, at the bed-cover and at the new creases in it. She straightened it, smoothing it with her hands, and checked to make sure the door was still closed. Next she removed her mobile phone from her pocket and took photographs of the hat and the bag. Then she went around the room, tidying it, packing up the boxes, returning them to their hiding place, carrying the stool to the dressing table, pulling at the wardrobe door to make sure it was locked. She crossed the room and checked everything again. The stool looked to be too far from the dressing table and at wrong angle. So she adjusted it. At the door she turned the handle and paused, listening. She pushed it wider and slipped from the room on to the landing.

She crossed to the stairs, descending them slowly, checking the floor below as it came into view. When she was sure she was alone, she ran across the hall to the back corridor. She stopped by the rear porch. The cat had gone from the chair. Did that mean Duncan was back? Did it mean anything? She ran again, across the steading courtyard and out into the field. She imagined Duncan pursuing her, shambling and lumbering like a creature in a horror movie. At the stone pillars, safe at last, she stopped and looked back.

‘Oh my God,’ she whispered. ‘You were there all the time.’

Duncan stood at the entrance to the steading, watching after her.