Losing Nicola (16 page)

‘What on earth made her keep track of that?' Dougal said.

‘She was fascinated by Mrs Stone – Farnham, I suppose she is really – the way she'd show up at her husband's trial day after day, dressed in amazing clothes. Mum loved all that sort of thing.' Bella laughed, a little shakily, thinking of Ava. ‘You should see the stuff she got together about the Profumo affair. Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler. She was completely captivated by those two.'

‘A lot of people were,' says Dougal. ‘Including Krista.'

‘These'll be fascinating, Bella. Thank you.' I touch the files, not sure whether I even want to read them or rehash the events of that summer. It would make much more sense to forget about it, to consign it to the past. Then I think of Julian. Of Sasha Elias. Of Orlando and myself. Perhaps one rainy afternoon, fortified by a glass or two of wine, I would get up the strength to delve once again into those far off and seminal days.

A
s if to accentuate how life constantly repeats itself, this is another exceptionally fine summer. The days pass in a fine web of heat. From the big bay window of my new home, I can see how it sits on the surface of the sea, holding the water steady, weighting down the waves like a paperweight. Along the front, children come and go on tricycles and bicycles, carrying beach balls and cricket bats, aimless, sated with sunshine, just as Orlando and I once were.

There are solitary men traipsing along the sliding pebbles, metal detectors swaying from left to right. There are fishermen carrying more equipment than an Everest expedition. There are the constant dog-walkers. And one of them, I see with surprise, and a certain alarm, seems to be Louise Stone, looking old and bent, though she can't be more than fifty-two. How could she bear to stay on here, after what happened? I wonder if she still lives in the brightly painted little house she used to occupy; one of these evenings, I might walk down to the North End and find out. Or, more likely, I might not.

More days of breathless heat. I am restless, worn out with trying to keep at bay the thoughts I cannot control. Nicola haunts me. The Secret Glade where we found her body: is it still there? Would it exorcise my memories if I were to walk along the sea front and find the place again? The grass on the green is yellow, like straw, parched for moisture, and I, too, am parched, needing something.

One afternoon I walk along the sea to where the low cliffs begin, then climb up through a green lane still hidden, as it was back then, by overhanging greenery and arching trees so that walking along it is like burrowing into the landscape. At the top, the Secret Glade is still there, though houses have crowded nearer on three sides, new brick developments already melding into the landscape with trees and mature gardens. I'm amazed at how close to Glenfield House the area is. As a child, it had seemed a fair distance, but even on foot it can't have been more than ten minutes from the garden gate. How had Nicola and Yelland been so foolhardy as to do what they did out in the open? Or had the possibility of being seen simply added to the excitement?

Several times I have walked past Glenfield, observing the changes that have taken place. The house and grounds have been done up: the woodwork is freshly painted, bricks repointed, the lawns mowed into orderliness. The tumbledown greenhouse has gone, the bamboo thickets have been tamed, the lily pond now contains water-lilies and a flash of neon orange indicating goldfish.

The nights are hot and sultry. I sleep badly. Even with the windows open and a breeze blowing in off the sea, the air in my bedroom is thick and close, almost unbreathable. I am flooded by the remembrance of things long past. That summer. Sasha. The body underneath the blackberry bushes. If only I could erase it from my mind. Late at night, I walk along the seafront in the warm dark, listening to the waves rolling in, churning up the shingle, in and out, the sound like a giant crunching stones and spitting them out. I smell pine trees and salt and green leaves, the scent of lilac and cut grass, blackberries on my fingers.

All day the light pours into my room, searingly hot even with the windows open and the white drapes pulled across. The Steinway stands in the bay and eventually, with some difficulty I manouevre it further into the room, not wanting the fine rosewood case to be damaged. I shove the piano-stool into place and finding it unexpectedly heavy, idly lift the lid. It's stuffed full of music: books, songs, an ancient annotated copy of
Messiah
, another of
Judas Maccabeus
. There was a thriving Choral Society in the town back then. I must find out if it still exists; if so, I shall join.

I dig deeper, displacing Bach and Rachmaninoff, Debussy and Chopin. Further down, I find
The First Book of Easy Pieces
. The paper cover is worn and dog-eared. I remember my excitement when I went into the music shop to order it, the feel of it as I later carried it home, my absolute certainty that some not very distant day I would be the cynosure of piano-loving eyes. I recognize the pieces so well, the annotations made by Sasha Elias, the finger numbering, the musical direction.
The Fairy's Picnic
and
By the Lake
; there they still are, waiting to be brought back to musical life. The music books are dog-eared and old-fashioned. Sasha had several pupils as well as me, Nicola and Mary. Were they all as unpromising as I was? I remember Fiona telling me that he was much in demand as an accompanist. From Gordon the Librarian, I knew he worked with the choir at St George's. Ekeing out, I now realize, what must have been a meagre income as music master at the boys' prep school where he taught. Did they tease him for his accent and shabby clothes? Did they torment him for being German?

We never got round to discussing such questions . . . I feel the pain in my heart again, that too-familiar sense of loss and regret.

There are also several books of manuscript paper. When I open one, I see thick black notes scattered across the pages, pieces which Sasha Elias himself must have composed. One is entitled
Homeland
. Another is called
Girls
and underneath the title, in spiky black letters:
Claire, Nicola, Mary.
And there's a third:
For Alice
. I can't help it. I flush with a warmth I recognize only too well. Where is he now? How can I find out?

As for Nicola . . . I do not want to think about her. For years I've managed to close all thoughts of her up in a box at the very back of my mind and am not about to release them now. Not for the first time since I moved in here, I wonder why I have chosen to throw myself back into the snake pit of memory.

I open another of the manuscript books and inside are sheets of paper;
Mutti
, I read.
My little sisters.
And on another page:
Here, where the land falls into the sea, I am more than alone. I am deserted, abandoned. I'm parched with loneliness, dying of it. I can smell it on myself, like an aura. Lonely beyond bearing, my clothes are stinking of it, as though I have soiled myself
.

Biting my lip – should I be reading what is obviously some kind of diary? – I carefully remove each sheet, place one on top of the next until I have a pile of ten or twelve sheets. Some only have a paragraph or two written on them; others seem to continue for several pages. I straighten them up, fuss with them, and finally, reluctantly, place them tidily on the lamp-table beside the sofa. I will read them, just as I once read Fiona's diaries . . . but not just yet.

One evening, as dusk turns the flat sea to the grey of aluminium, I walk towards the town, to the area they call the North End. Small twisty streets run down at right angles to the beach, crammed with tiny picturesque cottages, one jammed up against the next. The front doors open directly into the little sitting rooms, all of which contain a large brick hearth that must once have heated the entire house. The houses sit on top of cellars, earth-floored and sea-damp, where smugglers could stow the contraband unloaded from small boats run directly up onto the nearby shingle beach. The cellars created a network of interlocking tunnels where illicit cargoes could be hidden away or disposed of before the Excise Men had even come knocking at the door.

I turn away from the sea and walk quietly, almost on tiptoe, along Fisher Street, as though fearful that someone might otherwise lean from a window and accuse me of trespassing. Halfway down is what was once Louise Stone's house. The curtains are drawn only partly across the window and I have a clear view into the front room.

She is there. She is watching something on the television, seated on a sofa I recognize, with a small dog – a glossy little dachshund – beside her. She strokes one of the dachshund's ears, spreading it across her thigh as she does so. How does she look, glimpsed between the half-closed curtains? I don't know what I expected, but she seems calm, composed. Yet I wonder how she can be either of those, considering the double tragedy of the hand she has been dealt. Only a certain tension about the shoulders indicates that she is neither, that she waits, just as Ava used to wait, for something violent to hurtle back into her life.

Because I once knew Louise's house as well as my own, I know that the door to the right at the end of the room leads to a kitchen, that behind the length of beige velvet curtaining which covers the far wall is a patch of grass surrounded by flower beds and beyond the grass, an outbuilding which Louise had converted into an office.

To the right of the television, on a small side-table, is a photograph of a man with a smiling wife and two children. Next to it, another of the same two children, without their parents. I assume this is the family of Louise's son, Nicola's cripplingly self-conscious brother. I struggle to recall his name. Michael? Malcolm? Simon . . . Simon who never spoke. I move my head from side to side of the gap in the curtains, but can see no reminder of Nicola: the pain of her loss obviously still runs too deep. I stand at the door with my hand raised to ring the bell, and then draw back. I know that if I am to ease down into the time and place I have chosen to inhabit, then I shall have to speak to Louise. But is this the right occasion? In front of the window again, I see her abruptly look up, out at me, as if – although she cannot possibly see me – she knows I am there. As if she has been expecting me – or someone from the past – for years.

She looks younger than I had expected from seeing her hunched figure along the front. Her hair, once jet-black and cut like a boy's – like Nicola's – is still very short but now a becoming silvery grey. She strokes the dog again, turns her head and speaks to someone else in the room, and a man suddenly moves into my range of vision, white-haired but handsome. He stoops and tenderly kisses Louise's cheek then moves across the room towards the window outside which I stand. I shrink away, my heart racing and continue rapidly down the street, hoping my snooping into someone else's life has not been noticed. Again, a thought strikes me: do the people round here know that Louise Stone is not her real name, or was the investigation into Nicola's murder conducted under the pseudonym she had adopted?

I was afraid I might be lonely, away from the vigour of London, and indeed, occasionally I do find myself possessed of solitude. I am flooded by the remembrance of things long past. That blackberry summer. That grief. A shock so intense that even now, so many years later, it still stabs like a knife edge between my ribs.

But in the general course of things, I am very far from lonely. My work occupies me. The telephone keeps me in contact with friends both here and abroad, And this particular weekend, Erin is here. She is still my closest friend, a Californian, beautiful and wild, who sometimes spent summers with us, while her archaeologist parents worked in Africa. Currently living in London, she is attached to the American Embassy in some capacity I've never quite understood. She has a State-Department-owned flat in Sloane Street, four times the size of mine, furnished in Scandinavian minimalism, with a few startling canvasses on the walls, painted by Erin herself. She eats out nearly every night, and when she's at home, opens tins of baked beans, a taste she acquired years ago after enjoying the subtleties of my mother's post-war cuisine. This is her first visit since I moved in.

She settles into a corner of the big Chesterfield I bought from the auction rooms over in Sandwich, and spreads her arms across the back of it. Her sandy hair springs around her head like a lion's mane. On her elegant feet are gold sandals with the thinnest of high heels. Her toenails are painted a rich chocolate colour which precisely matches the short skirt she wears. She is tanned and lithe, far too exotic for this provincial town. She is beautiful, and knows it, but that hasn't spoiled the sweetness of her character. Men follow her with their tongues hanging out, but she is still waiting for Mr Right, who is proving surprisingly elusive.

‘You do realize that you'll go nuts here, don't you?' she says.

‘How do you figure that?' I say.

‘For one thing, sweets, just take a peek out the window.'

‘And?'

‘There is no one out there. Not one single person.'

‘I can see at least four fishermen. And a woman on a bike. And two people walking dogs.'

‘I mean no one you'd want to spend time with,' Erin says. ‘What are you going to do down here for God's sake? Who're you going to talk to?'

‘Give me time.'

‘I'll give you all the time in the world and you still won't find a kindred spirit down here. Jeez!' She springs to her feet and strides across the room, her calf muscles bunching, to sit beside me on the window-seat I found a local carpenter to build for me.

As so often, she's wrong. The fishing-cottages at the north end of the town have become bijou weekend retreats for jaded Londoners. Although I don't tell Erin this, I've already met a few of them, through the people who own the flat below mine. Most of them are not fishermen, but nor are they people I'd want to spend a lot of time with. One or two are people whose company I enjoyed. And there's Julian and his wife. Already I'm planning a supper party, enjoying the thought of getting out linen and silver, of buffing up furniture, unpacking Aunt's dinner service for the first time, polishing glasses, preparing food.