She turned away, towards the traffic squeezing slowly past the scene of the accident. A bus was inching its way through the gap between the delivery van in the middle of the road and the line of parked cars opposite. As it passed her, Aileen stepped on to the open platform, went inside and sat down on one of the bench seats. Once clear of the obstacle, the bus accelerated away. The other passengers — a mother and her two children, an old man with a small dog, two pale working-class girls and an Asian youth in a two-tone tracksuit — all turned to face the front again. Overhead, boots pounded on the upper deck. ‘We’re com-in’! We’re com-in’!’ voices chanted rhythmically.
‘Fares, please.’
‘Stamford Brook,’ Aileen replied automatically.
‘Don’t go there.’ The conductor was an elderly black, his voice and gestures robotic with exhaustion. ‘Change in Acton. Fifty pence.’
Aileen handed him the coins.
‘I couldn’t do anything about it,’ she said. ‘He ran straight out in front of me.’
The drumming overhead intensified.
‘SCOT-land! SCOT-land!’
The conductor handed her the ticket.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Aileen explained. ‘That’s why I’ve stopped blaming myself, you see.’
One of the working girls turned to stare at her. Then she whispered something to her friend and they both tittered. There was a clatter of boots on the stairs and two youths in T-shirts and skin-tight jeans appeared, waving open cans of lager. One of them had a Scottish flag draped around his shoulders. He waved his fist at the conductor.
‘Hey, you black jobbie, did you no’ hear the bell?’
Aileen took hold of his arm.
‘You’re going to die,’ she told him. ‘I promise you that.’
A can of McEwan’s wrapped in knuckles ornamented with swastikas and death’s heads swayed back and forth in the air a few inches from Aileen’s face.
‘You’s barmy, woman,’ he said, backing away.
The gob of white foam had pushed up through the keyhole-shaped opening in the can. It made Aileen think of the cuckoo-spittle that used to appear suddenly in spring. The long grasses by the stream were all spattered with the stuff. She would lie there for hours, hidden from view, sharing a sinful cigarette with her friend Liz. The clouds scudded along overhead, and in the windswept space between a lark was ecstatically soloing. Her mother used to tell a story about children from London who were evacuated to the Cotswolds during the war. ‘One day, one of the boys came home in great excitement. “There’s a little sparrer stuck up there!” he said. “He can’t get up and he can’t get down, and he ain’t half making a fuss about it!” The little Cockney had never seen a skylark before in his life, you see!’
When Aileen looked again, the youths had gone. At the next stop, the two girls got up and walked towards the platform with short rapid strides, hobbled at the knee by their tight acrylic skirts. As they passed Aileen they broke into suppressed giggles that turned into howls of laughter as soon as they were off the bus. From time to time the bus stopped and people got on or off. Eventually Aileen stood up.
‘Not this one,’ warned the conductor.
‘It’s all right,’ she replied. ‘I know my way.’
Once off the bus, however, the streets seemed unfamiliar. Still, if she kept walking she would get home sooner or later. Occasionally a dog barked in one of the houses as she passed, or she overheard music or the abrupt roar of recorded laughter, or saw lights left on in an empty room. Of course, all these phenomena could have been simulated by devices such as the one that Douglas had installed.
As it began to get dark, she found herself in a long avenue built on a slight curve. The houses had windows consisting of eight panes set in a curved bay, and whenever a car approached, its headlights caught the panes one after the other, making the windows flash like warning beacons. But a few hundred yards further on, everything became familiar again, and the only puzzle was how it could have previously looked so strange. Aileen supposed it was due to her having taken an unfamiliar route. Even a place you know well can look odd if approached from an unfamiliar direction. She didn’t think about it much, preoccupied with her enjoyment at having got home safely. In spite of all that had happened, she was looking forward immensely to getting inside and shutting the door behind her, to eating and drinking and watching TV. Life goes on, she told herself. That’s all it does. It goes on, until it stops.
As she approached the front door, searching through her handbag for her keys, the phone started ringing inside. It would probably be Douglas, ringing to say that he had arrived safely. How nice of him! She felt very warm about Douglas sometimes, particularly when he wasn’t there. Her hand blindly rooted about in the bag, turning up her purse and diary, various items of make-up, two letters and a packet of tissues, but no keys. The ringing broke off with a truncated blip. She imagined Douglas setting down the receiver and turning away, disappointed or angry or even worried. As for the keys, she’d left them in the door of the Mini, of course.
Driving with Raymond in the mountains north of Los Angeles, Aileen had noticed that almost every bend in the road was marked by a black sign with one or more death’s heads painted on it. Raymond had explained that each skull marked the scene of a fatal accident. But when her taxi reached the spot where Steven Bradley had died a few hours earlier, there was no sign that anything of any interest or importance had ever taken place there. Aileen paid the driver and walked around the corner to the place where she had left the Mini. It wasn’t there. With it had gone the keys to her house, whose address was marked on several of the letters and other documents she had left on the back seat. That meant it wouldn’t be safe to go home, but before the implications of this had sunk in she saw Steven. He came at her like a wolf, swooping across the street straight in front of a car that never swerved an inch to avoid him, just as though he wasn’t there. Aileen screamed at him again and again, trying to scare him off, until people appeared at the windows of the nearby houses to see what was the matter.
She was in luck: the taxi that had brought her to the corner was still there, parked at the kerb, the driver counting his takings. At first he said he was off duty, but when Aileen told him where she wanted to go he smirked and nodded her into the back. The taxi dropped her at the side of the main block, by the sign ‘WARNING HAZCHEM’. The night staff were very sympathetic about the loss of her car and keys. They provided tea and biscuits and said of course she could spend the night. In the morning, Aileen knew, everything would be all right again. But first there was the night to get through. Before going to bed she paid a visit to the dispensary and took some Valium. Mindful of what had happened last time, she restricted herself to the manufacturer’s suggested dose, even though her room was in the basement and the window had bars on it.
In other respects, the experience was not dissimilar. She awoke in broad daylight, in a hospital. No one mentioned miracles this time, but of course miracles only happen once. Most striking of all, she’d had the flying dream again, and this time it lingered tantalizingly on the fringes of her consciousness. The merest nudge, she felt, would be enough to bring it back into focus. But her waking consciousness was too gross and clumsy an instrument, and a few moments later it was impossible to believe that the experience hadn’t all been an illusion. She washed and dressed, drank several cups of tea, thanked the staff and set out to walk to the tube. It was a warm and sunny day, and her mood had changed too. In fact a miracle of sorts had occurred, after all, for she felt sane again. She knew that she had been in shock the evening before, and had acted pretty oddly. But all that was over now.
Her mood was briefly marred by the discovery, when she reached the tube station, that she had left her handbag behind at the hospital. Evidently some of the Valium must still be spicing her chemical soup, making her dopey and inattentive. For a moment she thought of going back to get it, but it was a long way through an unattractive part of West Kilburn. Besides, there was nothing of any value in the bag. Her money and credit cards were in her purse, which she had put in her coat pocket after paying the taxi driver the night before. The real problem was the loss of her keys. She would have to inform the police, then call a locksmith. It would take the whole day, just when she felt she needed a rest, peace and quiet.
It wasn’t until she reached Paddington that she understood what she was going to do. Coming up from the underground tunnels to change to the District line, she caught sight of a sign reading ‘Main Line Station’. Without a second thought, she followed the arrow, made her way to the booking office and bought a weekend return to Cheltenham. It was the perfect solution! She tried to phone her parents before boarding the train, but the phones were all in use or out of order. It didn’t matter, anyway. They would be only too pleased to see her, even though she turned up unannounced with nothing but the clothes she stood up in. They would understand, bless them. They always did. And from there she would phone the police, report the theft of her car keys and ask them to keep an eye on the house. It would be bliss to get out of London for a couple of days, to go home. It was just what she needed.
The train was scruffy, blisteringly hot and packed. Aileen put her coat on the overhead rack and squeezed into a corner seat, where she lay back and closed her eyes. When she awoke, they were already in the country. Bright sunlight fell on flat farmland with a roll of low hills in the distance. The carriage had emptied somewhat, although it was still quite crowded. On the seat opposite, a man with a smugly glum expression was leafing through a newspaper with the headline ‘LEAVE IT AHT, RON!’ Next to him, in the window seat, a relentlessly articulate middle-class father was talking the toddler on his knee through the scene outside, naming all the buildings and animals, explaining their functions and purpose, instructing his creation in the various amenities of a world that had been brought into being for his benefit.
Aileen slept in short snatches, during which the scene outside gradually changed from the bleak expanses of chalk and clay to the secretive limestone landscape she knew so well: valleys that seemed too big for the limpid streams lined with elms and willows, meadows full of unbothered sheep, villages that seemed to have been exposed by a process of erosion. Inside the train they were still in London, while out there, just the other side of the glass streaked with urban filth, was a whole countryside so intimately linked to Aileen’s childhood that for her it would never quite grow up.
When she next opened her eyes, the train had come to a stop in a small station. Sunlight fell hot and heavy on the seat where she was sitting, bringing out sweat under the light cotton dress which had seemed too scanty just the day before. Further down the carriage a portable stereo was dispensing a slouching reggae beat over which a rap artist was doing vocal karate. The seat opposite was now occupied by a harassed-looking mother and child. The mother was staring out of the window with an obstinate expression, pointedly ignoring the child, a girl of about six with a face like a blancmange, who was crying loudly.
‘Don’t make such a fuss!’ her mother snapped.
She can’t get up and she can’t get down, thought Aileen, that’s the problem. But she was careful not to say anything. The music gouged and stabbed, the child cried, the train did not move. There seemed no reason why it should ever move again. Sunlight streamed in through the grimy window, making the carriage unbearably hot and airless. The bawling child and the ghetto-blaster competed gamely for attention. No one else seemed bothered by any of this, but Aileen felt that if she stayed there a minute longer she would go mad. She opened the door and stepped out on to the platform, determined to find out what was going on and how much longer they were going to have to wait there. Outside the train, the air was deliciously cool and fresh, delicately scented. The sunlight was light and gentle, modulated by a slight breeze, no longer a penance.
‘Hey!’ A man in uniform waved at her from the next carriage. ‘Get back in!’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Aileen replied icily.
‘You can’t get off here! The train doesn’t stop here.’
The only advantage of living with a complete bastard, Aileen had realized, was that it gave you a head start in dealing with all the other bastards you came across in the course of your everyday life. The guard’s words made her remember one evening when she had made the mistake of greeting Douglas’s early return with, ‘Oh, I thought you were still at work.’ She hadn’t forgotten his crushing rejoinder.
‘There are doubtless various ingenious ways of demonstrating that you’re mistaken,’ she told the guard airily. ‘But under the circumstances it may be sufficient to point out that the train has stopped and that I have got off.’
The man didn’t respond, and at that moment the train started to move again. In the same instant Aileen realized what he had meant. This was not a normal stop but a disused station where the train had come to a halt waiting for a signal to change. The platform at her feet was still more or less intact, with the odd plant pushing up between the slabs, but the nameboards had been removed and the station building looked as though it had been hit by a shell.
The train disappeared round a bend and the signal changed soundlessly back to red. Aileen laughed to herself. It served her right! She’d been hoist with her own petard, or rather with Douglas’s, which she’d ill-advisedly borrowed. There was nothing for it but to walk to the nearest village and phone her parents. She couldn’t be far from home now and fortunately her father was always glad of an excuse to take the car out. ‘But what on earth happened?’ he would ask. ‘Well,’ she’d reply, ‘it’s a long story!’ She climbed through the slack barbed-wire fence which separated the platform from the station yard, and began to walk up the drive, the gravel crunching under her feet. It was hard to feel annoyed by what had happened when it had brought her this quiet, these scents and sounds, the wonderful sunlight and this breeze that ruffled the little golden hairs on her arms.
The track joined a narrow lane that crossed the stream and the railway and started to climb the other side of the valley. The verges were dense with overgrown vegetation, an impenetrable clutter of spindly tendrils matted together, bending under their own weight. Aileen had once feared the approach of winter, but now she found it a relief to think that all this superfluous growth would soon be swept away. It seemed almost threatening in its mindless proliferation. After a while the lane joined a wider road, boasting a white line in the middle. A signpost indicated one village five and three-quarter miles to the left and another half a mile to the right. On the other side of the road stood an imposing pair of stone gateposts, one of which bore a sign lettered in gold on a blue ground.
Netherbourne Hall
Golden Age Sheltered Accommodation
Beneath this, a separate notice read ‘No Through Road’. Through the gates, Aileen could see an Elizabethan manor house with gables, mock crenellation, traceried windows and clusters of tall chimney-stacks, all in the local honey-coloured stone. It looked vaguely familiar. No doubt she had come here at some time with her parents, on a Sunday afternoon drive. Perhaps she could phone from there, she thought. If it was an old people’s home it couldn’t be strictly private. There would always be relatives coming to visit. The drive curved sinuously away to the right through fenced-off parkland where sheep were grazing. Clouds occasionally drifted over the sun, muting the colours and casting a cool dull spell over the scene. As Aileen got closer to the house, she began to feel uneasy about going in. They must be fed up with people sneaking around the place with some feeble excuse or other, taking pictures. But by now she had come so far that it would be quicker to detour across the lawn and try and find a way out to the village, which according to the signpost lay only half a mile away in that direction.
Even the Macklins’ next-door neighbour, the exacting Mr Griffiths, might have approved of the lawn, a magnificent expanse of grass trimmed in perfectly straight strips, except where circular flowerbeds had been planted around the stumps of two trees whose roots presumably went too deep for them to be removed without damage. Aileen strolled across it, glancing nervously at the grey stone facade of the house. She was afraid that at any moment one of the many windows would open with a bang and someone lean out and demand to know who she was and where she was going. Nothing of the sort happened, however. In a few moments she had reached the path, which led past the end of the opposite wing into a glade of enormous rhododendron plants. Beyond stood a small church, and Aileen decided to go in and have a look. Her mother knew every church for miles around, and if this one turned out to have a thirteenth-century font or a perfectly preserved hammerbeam roof Aileen would never hear the end of it. She was already starting to worry about what to say to her parents.
She walked through the lych-gate and up the path that curved past tumbling tombstones covered in elegant but largely illegible lettering. The porch was protected by a screen-door to keep out birds. This was open, but she wondered whether the church itself would be. So many were kept locked these days, a thing unheard of when she and her parents had done their tours. ‘The house of God is always open,’ she remembered her mother saying sententiously, and then making a disapproving noise when her husband added, ‘Unlike the public houses, alas.’ Aileen grasped the ring of braided iron set in the massive door and turned. There was a loud clack and the door swung back. The place smelt as ripely musty as a cellar. A pile of hymnals stood on a low table near the door, below a noticeboard displaying a photograph of a drought victim in Africa and a faded typewritten note explaining that a service was held there on the fourth Sunday of every alternate month.
She walked slowly around. The church had evidently been subject to some pretty brutal restoration, and its most striking feature was a set of memorials to the local gentry spanning some three hundred years. The earliest was a statue of an Elizabethan gentleman leaning on his elbow with an expression of fastidious boredom, as if death were the last in a long series of social duties which he had undertaken without enthusiasm or complaint. After that the style turned chilly and classical for a century or so, all marble urns and garlands, before Victorian earnestness took over. The last plaque, near the door, was a brass plate with incised red and black lettering. It commemorated two brothers: Rupert Jeffries, 1898–1916, Duke et decorum est pro patria mori, and Maurice Jeffries, 1898-, Et in Arcadia ego. The missing date seemed rather bizarre, as though suggesting that the person concerned might not really be dead. The little leaflet on the history of the church, which Aileen found on the table next to the hymnals and for which she was urged to make a contribution of ‘at least 6d’, proved unhelpful. It mentioned only that the Hall had been uninhabited for some time following the deaths of both heirs to the estate during the Great War and was now, ‘like so many of our great country houses, virtually derelict’. It was only when she made to put her contribution in the collecting box that Aileen realized that her purse was in the pocket of her coat, which she had left on the rack in the train.
Outside, the sky had clouded over quite considerably. It had grown almost uncomfortably close. The loss of her purse was a blow, for although it only contained about ten pounds, it was all she had with her. The attractions of this improvised day in the country were rapidly beginning to fade. She would have to find a phone box and make a reversed charge call, but first she had to find the way into the village. Regaining the path she had been on before, she came to another imposing set of gates leading out of the estate. Unlike the ones by which she had entered, however, these were locked and chained and clearly no longer in use. This was doubly frustrating, because she could see the rooftops of the village through the foliage beyond the gates, not more than a few hundred yards away. There was no way out, however. The alternatives were to return the way she had come, to take a narrow path to the right marked ‘Staff Only’, or to turn left up a track which skirted the wall of the estate. This seemed to offer the best possibility of finding a short cut to the village, and Aileen started along it.
The track was at first covered in gravel, but this soon gave way to a rough surface of dried mud, deeply rutted, with a strip of grass and wild flowers in the middle. The parkland surrounding the manor house gradually turned to rough meadow as the track had started to climb the open hillside. This proved surprisingly steep, and despite her impatience to get to a phone, Aileen found herself pausing frequently for breath, once even taking the opportunity to pick some overripe blackberries from the bushes in the ditching beside the track. The berries burst as she pulled them off, staining her fingers. Afterwards she wished she had left them alone, for she had nothing to wipe her hands on. It was already going to be difficult enough to come up with a story to tell her parents without making herself sound totally scatty. The last thing she needed was to turn up with her hands and dress apparently stained with blood. There was no sign of any path or road leading off to the village. The track ran straight ahead to the top of the hill. Aileen kept looking about her as she walked, hoping to find a bit of waste paper she could clean her hands on, but the only things she saw were useless to her: a work glove of some shiny red rubberized material lying palm up on the ground, and a large piece of torn plastic marked Gro-More, which had become trapped in the barbed-wire fencing and was flapping loudly in the wind. Finally she came to a dew-pond beside the track, a deep crater lined with black plastic sheeting. As she bent to wash the blackberry juice off her hands, she caught sight of her reflection in the water. She looked frail and fragile. The sleeveless white dress clung to her body like a shift. She put her hands into the water, blurring the image.
The land to either side grew barer and more exposed as she neared the crest of the hill. The traditional drystone walls had been swept away to create large efficient spaces for the cereal crop whose severed stalks covered the ground. Clouds of smoke started drifting across the track, light and tenuous at first, then suddenly thick, billowing and impenetrable. It looked as though some tremendous disaster had taken place. There were flames blended in with the smoke, orange turning to brown or brilliant red. The air was filled with their crackling. When the smoke thinned for a moment, Aileen saw figures running about with pitchforks, carrying smouldering straw to spread the blaze to the unburnt stubble. But they were too far away for her to ask for directions, and the next moment the wind changed direction, plunging her back into the smoke, which grew so thick that she could only see intermittently. When the smoke finally cleared, Aileen paused to take stock of her situation. The track she was on looked like one of the old drove-roads which continued for miles across the hills without passing any human habitation. The clouds were getting thicker and darker every moment: it was pretty obviously going to pour with rain in the not-too-distant future. About fifty yards further on there was a farmhouse standing beside the track, and rather than walking all the way back again, Aileen decided to go and ask for directions. They might know of a footpath down to the village, or even have a phone she could use. As the building grew nearer, Aileen was surprised to see how impressive it was for an outlying tenant farm. It had three storeys, with large gables, and was built of the local stone, richly mottled with lichen. Even more surprising, it appeared to be derelict. A new corrugated iron barn had been erected nearby and was being used to store various pieces of farm machinery, but the house itself seemed to be abandoned. The garden was a wilderness, several of the windows were smashed and the front door stood open.
The first sign she had of what was happening was when the dust at her feet suddenly started to flick up into the air and the first drops struck her arms. A moment later the rain was pelting down and her dress had turned a shade darker. She ran into the garden of the house and took shelter under an enormous yew tree growing there. The rain hung across the landscape as thick as a curtain, blown in folds by the wind. Already the track had turned into a stream flowing back towards the valley. With the gusting wind, the yew provided scant shelter. Aileen now saw that a path of sorts had been cleared through the nettles and long grass to the front door of the farmhouse. As the storm showed no sign of slackening for the moment, she decided to make a dash for it.
Once across the threshold, everything was dry and hushed and still. The place seemed at first to be in reasonably good order, which only increased the mystery of why it was uninhabited, given the property values in the area these days. But as soon as she started looking around, it became clear that this was an illusion. There had been no vandalism or wanton destruction: the house had just started to collapse under its own weight. The hallway and stairs were still intact, but the other rooms were a shambles, the flagstones of the floor covered in fallen joists and chunks of lath and plaster. Aileen stood looking about at the vast space above her head, cleared of all partitions, listening to the wind roaring in the cavernous fireplace and the rattle of rain against the leaded window panes. She felt very tired suddenly, deeply weary. She longed to be home. Then, quite distinctly, high overhead, she heard a cry.
Slowly and calmly, as though she had been expecting this, Aileen turned and made her way back to the hall, stepping carefully over the lengths of wood and lumps of plaster on the floor. Outside in the garden, the yew was tossing to and fro like a head in pain, but within the house all was still. When she gripped the banister her hand came away covered in dirt, and the stairs creaked loudly as she started to climb them. They advanced towards a blind wall, then reversed direction and continued up to a landing lit by one of the broken windows. It was only when she looked to her left, through a doorway that opened on to nothing, that Aileen felt any fear. But even then it was only for a moment, and the cry she had heard was constantly repeated, plaintive and pleading, impossible to ignore. The next set of stairs was narrower and steeper, one long, continuous flight spanning the entire width of the house. The steps were tall and heavily worn and the bare plaster wall was discoloured by rubbing shoulders, as though generations had passed that way. Gradually Aileen’s body blocked out the light from the window below until she could see nothing. She groped forward into the darkness, where her outstretched hands encountered a rough wooden surface. Beyond it, the cry sounded again and again, louder and more urgent than before. Aileen pushed and struck the door in vain, almost panicking as she failed to find any handle. Then her frantic fingers stumbled on a latch set high up. As soon as she pressed the release, the door sprang open like a trap and something came straight at her face, speedy and mobile, inhumanly crying. She threw herself to one side, holding up her hands to protect her face. At the last moment the bird veered round in a tight curve and flew straight at one of the windows. It struck the glass hard and fell to the floor, where it fluttered about dazedly, uttering its mournful cry.
The attic ran the whole length and width of the house, an expanse of bare planks lit by the three windows, one in each of the gables. Overhead, rafters supported the overlapping stone tiles of the roof. It was here, no doubt, that the bird had got in, slipping through a chink between two tiles. Unable to find its way out again, it was staring at Aileen with an expression which seemed full of pride and hurt, of baffled resentment. All she had to do was open one of the windows. She had covered about half the distance, moving slowly so as not to alarm the bird any further, when she heard something snap and felt a jolt underfoot. The bird promptly took to the air, perching on a tie-beam as the centre of the floor sagged several inches. When she tried to turn back, Aileen fell on her side, deceived by the slope of the boards. Under this impact the floor opened up completely, but Aileen was aware of this only for an instant. Then night fell, warm and black and luminous. The lawn stretched smoothly away, flowing out and around the two great beeches. The grass was heavy with dew, which gleamed flawlessly in the moonlight as she glided across it, her feet not touching the ground, the air softly lifting and enfolding her. The vision can have lasted only the few seconds that it took her falling body to reach the stone slabs below, but it was of such power and beauty that it seemed a more than adequate recompense for everything that had ever happened to her, and for whatever was about to happen.