Spider Light (17 page)

Playing for time, she said, ‘Can you get back upstairs if I support you?’

‘No…Too weak to walk, old girl. Kept alive by…drinking own urine. Cupped hands…’ And, as Thomasina made a gesture of distaste, the dreadful voice said, ‘Soldier’s trick–in desert.’

‘I’ll get you out,’ said Thomasina, not moving.

Simon made a feeble movement, and then fell back against the
bricks. His voice, when he spoke again, was thin and weak, ‘You’ve found out, haven’t you? That’s why you’ve come back.’

‘Found out?’ Thomasina’s mind snapped onto a different course.

‘About Maud.’ said Simon. ‘You know that I–lied…’

‘What?
What?
’

‘Morning sickness–it wasn’t true…but couldn’t stand another night…’

Thomasina stared at him, but before she could take this in, a faint sound from within the tunnels made her turn sharply to the door. A stealthy footstep, had it been? No, it was only the old timbers creaking.

She looked back at Simon, and said, ‘Now, how do we get you out of here, I wonder?’

She thought Simon started to speak, but the sound came again, and this time it was not Twygrist’s timbers. This time it was unmistakably the sound of footsteps running along the tunnels. A cloaked figure appeared in the doorway of the kiln room. Maud! Maud, her eyes wild and unseeing, her hair whipped into disarray. She grasped the edge of the door, and before Thomasina could gather her wits sufficiently to do anything about it, had pushed it inward.

The hinges shrieked with a teeth-wincing sound, and the door slammed shut.

In the gust of air caused by the door’s closing, the candle went out.

Maud had not intended to follow Thomasina. What she had intended was to go home to Toft House and tell her father that Thomasina had gone away for a few days.

The prospect of this had buoyed her up all the way across the park, but just as she went through the gates, and set off towards Toft Lane, she saw Thomasina some way ahead of her, walking along very purposefully indeed. Maud went after her keeping well back and hoping not to be seen. It was a surprise when Thomasina
turned off the road and went up the slope to Twygrist. She waited to be sure Thomasina was not coming out of the mill and then went after her.

The door was partly open, and the minute she stepped through it Twygrist’s dark sourness fell around her like a cloak. When she was small, her father had liked to bring her here to show her off to the women workers. They had all made a fuss of her, saying she was a dear little soul, what pretty hair she had, and how much would she charge for one of her sunny curls? After Maud’s mamma died, the women had said sorrowfully that she was a poor motherless lamb and must learn to be a good little housewife and look after her papa. Even so, she had hated Twygrist and she hated it now.

It looked as if Thomasina had gone down to the underground rooms, because the little door behind the waterwheel was propped open. Maud, slipped behind the wheel. There was a faint spill of light from the stairway, so Thomasina must have brought candles or an oil lamp with her. Maud took a deep breath and went down the steps, doing so very softly.

She could hear Thomasina somewhere up ahead–she even heard her muttering to herself, as she sometimes did. Most likely she was tutting at the mess down here; Maud could not hear very clearly. But she did hear the scrape of the kiln-room doors being opened.

This was puzzling. Why should Thomasina be going into the kiln room? But the reason did not matter, because a marvellous plan was shaping itself in Maud’s mind. Would it work? Would she dare? She went a bit nearer. Yes, the kiln-room door was open. Now? Yes,
now!

Her cloak billowed out behind her like dark smoke as Maud darted along the last few feet of the tunnel and grasped the edges of the door. For the space of three heartbeats the moment froze, and she stared into the candlelit room. She saw the brick lining of the walls and the floor, smeary with cobwebs and dirt, and the old oven with the brick shaft rising up behind it.

Thomasina stared at Maud, astonished but not actually frightened. Lying on the floor at her feet was a grey-faced man. Simon! Aha, then Simon had not gone home after all. He had been hiding here all along. But whatever sly plan these two might have had, it was going to be turned against them because Maud was going to punish both of them in one fell swoop!

Before they could realize what she meant to do, Maud pushed the door as hard as she could. It swung inwards and locked, trapping Thomasina and Simon inside.

Coming up into the afternoon sunlight again, huge dazzling lights opened up inside Maud’s mind. Marvellous. She had not known how good it would feel to punish those two cruel beings. It would have been better if she could have locked Twygrist’s main door, but of course she had no keys.

There was no one around as she began to walk back to Quire, but Maud had not gone many yards when she heard the sound of tapping. She slowed her footsteps and half turned, listening. For a moment there was nothing, then it came again. Light, but insistent.
Tap-tap…
Tap-tap. It was probably someone carrying out some sort of work nearby: hammering nails into a roof or chopping wood.

Or a faltering hand knocking feebly on the inside of a door, trying to get out?

That was ridiculous. Even if Thomasina or Simon were tapping on the walls, Maud could not possibly hear them all the way up here. It would be a workman somewhere, and she would soon be out of earshot.

But she was not soon out of earshot. The sounds followed her as she hurried through the lanes towards Quire House.
Tap-tap…Tap-tap…
As she went through the gates, the sounds changed to
Let-us-out…
Maud shivered and went into the house, slipping up to her room unseen.

Tap-tap…Let-us-out…

The sounds stayed with her while she had her lunch in the
dining room. Mrs Minching was pleased to see her downstairs at last. It was a nasty thing this influenza, wasn’t it, and it was to be hoped Miss Maud was properly recovered?

Maud said she was feeling very much better, thank you. No, she had not seen Miss Thomasina that morning, perhaps she had gone out to one of Quire’s tenants.

Several times in the hours that followed Maud had to fight not to clap her hands over her ears to shut the tapping out.
Could
it be those two in Twygrist?

Of course it could not. She was hearing her own guilty conscience because of what she had done. Except she did not feel any guilt.

She drowned out the sounds by playing some music.

It had been a bitter blow when, after all Donna’s care over furnishing the small flat for the two of them, Don did not want to live at home. He had not got a university place–Donna had not really thought he would, although she could have borne his absence on that account and would have enjoyed it. She had even dared to imagine herself and Don in an Oxford common room, or dancing together at the May Ball, and strolling across one of the famous quadrangles, arm in arm…

The reality had been harshly different. Don said the flat had been all right for school holidays–of course it had. But he had arranged to go with a couple of friends (what friends? Donna thought she knew all his friends) on a grape-picking tour of southern France. And then on to Spain, perhaps. There would be enough money for that, wouldn’t there? Oh, well, if not, he would manage. They were going to live very simply anyway in pensions, or they might take one of those old farmhouses for a few months. It would be great fun and he did think he was owed a little fun after the last couple of years. His French would improve immensely–he might get all kinds of work at the end of it. Not teaching, which would be too tedious for words, but translating or something like that.

Donna had tried not to think that Don was going to spend the next couple of years drifting around western Europe, using up money they did not have, going aimlessly from one thing to another, not really living any sort of life at all…Leaving her on her own in the beautiful flat on which she had lavished so much love and care, never mind money she could not really afford, and where she had spent endless lonely nights counting the days until the next school holiday…

But she let him go, of course. She trusted him to come back to her. She smiled and hugged him when he left, and said he was to be sure to write and tell her what he was doing, and to remember that there was always a home for him here. If he was in trouble–if he needed money–he must not hesitate to let her know.

‘And you’ll come to my rescue, will you?’ For a moment there had been a glimmer of the beloved boy who used to smile with come-to-bed eyes, and there had been a stirring of shared memories–of how they had laughed together, and of how they had lain in the tangled bed in Charity Cottage on that enchanted afternoon…

Donna had hardly been able to bear it. She said, quite briskly, ‘Of course I’d come to your rescue. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men.’

‘I believe you would.’

‘I always will,’ said Donna, and let him go.

The terrible thing was that when he finally came home for good, it was not as Donna had hoped. He was not the same: he was moody, sometimes sullen, occasionally he was very nearly violent. If she put her arms round him, he hunched his shoulders and shrugged her off, saying, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’ or, ‘Leave me alone!’ Once he said she was not living in the real world at all: she was living in some absurd dream existence.

And then had come the night of the quarrel.

It came out of nowhere, and predictably it was about money.

Don had come back to England because the bank had refused
to cash any more of his cheques. He had no money sense–Donna knew that and she accepted it. He had thought he was going to be well off–they had both thought so–and he could not understand that there was not enough money for him to do the things he wanted to do: go to wine bars and clubs with his friends, travel, go to concerts, have a good time. Why should he not do those things? He was good-looking and charming, and he had masses of friends. Donna understood that, as well.

When he was first home from the French grape-picking jaunt, taking up the threads of his English life again, she thought he would ask her to go with him to the clubs and the parties he attended. She had bought new clothes, wanting to look good for him, planning how his friends would admire her, and how they would give little dinner parties in their flat. People would tell one another how enjoyable it was to be invited to the flat.

Don would be proud of her. ‘You outshine all the rest,’ he would say when they gave a party or went to one, and the old intimacy would be there between them again, and perhaps one night…

But Don did not take her with him and the old intimacy was not there. If she asked where he was going he gave a vague answer. He would be clubbing, he said or there was a bit of an evening at somebody’s house. ‘No one you know. You wouldn’t like it.’

He bought expensive designer clothes and expensive drinks–Donna did not even dare wonder if he was taking drugs. Yes, he would get a job, he said vaguely, when she questioned him. He was only waiting for the right one to come along.

On the night the quarrel blew up, Donna had driven to collect him from a wine bar. She had managed to stop him using her car when he went out–she was struggling financially to keep it taxed, insured and roadworthy as it was–but the result had been massive taxi bills: double fare after midnight, of course; triple if it was the small hours of Sunday morning. And so on this particular night she had resolved to collect him, and she parked near the club’s entrance, hearing the throbbing music coming from the doors. It
reminded her of that magical afternoon at Charity Cottage. Was Don dancing in the dimly lit underground room, pressed up against some girl, some cheap little tart who wanted his body? If he came out tangled with a girl, Donna would drive away and leave him to find his own way home, and sod the taxi fare. But if he was on his own…

He was on his own. He was not walking entirely steadily, but he was not incapable. Donna drove forward, and leaned across to open the passenger door for him. A look of such rage showed on his face that for a moment she thought he was going to ignore her and walk home by himself, but he got in and slumped in the passenger seat. His hair was dishevelled and tumbling over his forehead, and his eyes were brilliant from drink (or drugs). He was so outrageously good-looking that Donna could hardly bear to think of all the girls who must have been watching him, planning to get their claws into him, the over-sexed bitches.

He was furious with her. He was not a child, he said, to be collected at the school gates by an over-anxious parent. Why must she do this all the time?

For a moment Donna could not speak. But she refused to be hurt because this was just one of his tantrums. One of the nerve-storms he had sometimes because his sensitivity was more finely tuned than most people’s. So she simply switched on the ignition and released the handbrake, preparatory to driving home.

He snatched the handbrake back on, and leaned over to turn the ignition off. He smelt of stale cigarette smoke and sweat.

‘Tell me,’ he said, turning in the seat to face her. ‘Tell me what the fuck this is all about!’ And then, with a sudden change of expression, he said very softly, ‘Oh, but of course, that’s what it
is
about, isn’t it? It’s about the fuck.’

Donna stared at him, seeing real cruelty in his eyes. She started to speak, but he cut her off.

‘It’s that afternoon at the cottage, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘That afternoon when you couldn’t get enough of it–when you couldn’t get enough of
me
–and they caught us. And now you want it again,
don’t you? Jesus Christ, you’d wanted it for years before that day, and you’ve wanted it ever since–all these years.’ He grabbed her hand suddenly, and thrust it between his legs. ‘You can have it for all I care,’ he said, and his voice was jeering. ‘Providing I can get it up, of course, because I’m pretty pissed tonight. In fact I’m pissed off, pissed off with life. But if it’s really what you want, I daresay I can manage.’ He began to unbuckle the belt of his jeans.

Donna snatched her hand away from him as if it had been burned. She said, in a low furious voice, ‘How can you! How can you speak about it like that!’

‘About “it”? Jesus God, Donna, it was a single bizarre fuck! Nothing more! I was bored out of my mind and you were panting for it, so I thought, “Oh, why not? What’s incest, after all? Only a shag kept in the family, isn’t it?”’

Donna could hardly believe it was Don’s beloved voice. He was drunk of course, and he might be high as well. Let it go, said her mind, but the disappointments of the last years rose up in her throat like acid, and she said furiously, ‘Was it just for that–just for a bizarre fuck–that I did what I did that day at Twygrist?’

In the silence that followed she could hear the dull thrum of the traffic on the nearby main road and the throbbing beat of the heavy rock music from within the club. She could no longer look at Don; she stared unseeingly through the windscreen at the unfriendly darkness.

At last he said, in a voice stripped of the hurtful jeering note, ‘What did you do? Donna, for God’s sake, tell me what you did that day.’

Donna turned to look at him at last. In a cold tight little voice, she said, ‘Don’t pretend. You know perfectly well what I did.’ And saw with sick horror that he had not been pretending at all; he had genuinely not known what she had done that last summer at Amberwood.

On that last day, Donna had woken up with a headache, just as she had told the police. A queer, clawing headache, it had been.

Unable to bear the confines of the cottage Donna had walked along Quire’s main driveway and through the gates. She told the police she walked all the way to the shop on the village’s outskirts; in reality she simply sat on the grass verge outside the grounds, fighting the clawing images inside her head.

Very faintly she heard the church clock striking twelve, and although the chimes had come to her fuzzily, as if the clock were under water, the sound seemed to mark something hugely important–the crossing of some kind of line, the giving up of a struggle. With the sound had come the sudden slotting into place of half memories, of things seen and unconsciously stored away: local knowledge absorbed–Amberwood’s history and its industry and the workings of Twygrist, and of how they could all be put together. It would work, thought Donna, hugging her bent knees against her chest, her mind seething. Oh God, I believe it would work.

She got up, dusting bits of grass from her skirt, and went back to the cottage. Her headache had vanished, although she felt a bit odd: remote and over-calm, in the way you sometimes felt when you had taken a hefty dose of paracetamol.

Her mother was making sandwiches for lunch in the kitchen. She accorded Donna a brief nod–they were not really speaking to one another at this stage–and Donna poured herself a glass of fruit juice from the fridge, and looked out of the window while she drank it. To say it? To say it
now
?

It seemed, much later, that she was still trying to make up her mind when she heard her own voice saying, quite casually, ‘I’ve just been down to the village shop–I heard something there about Twygrist that might interest you.’ Pause there, Donna, remember the value of a pause at what’s called the psychological moment.

The name Twygrist acted as a hook, as Donna had known it would. Her mother looked up from slicing ham. ‘Yes?’

‘That old clock on the side of the mill,’ said Donna, sounding disinterested, sounding very nearly bored. ‘Apparently it’s a memorial clock—’

‘Yes, I know it is. They have a clock-winder–it’s an appointment that gets handed down—’

‘Well, somebody in the shop was telling me that when the clock was put up, a stone tablet was put inside the mill at the same time. Sunk into the floor or the wall or something. It’s engraved with the date and the name of the person whose memory it’s for, and something about the clock-winder tradition as well.’

She had her mother’s full attention now; it was almost as if the ugly scenes of the last few days had not happened. ‘What sort of stone tablet? What does the engraving say?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Donna moodily. ‘For all I know it’s the life and times of the Amberwood miller. Or just one of those Kilroy-was-here things.’

‘Oh, I think it would be worth seeing,’ said Donna’s mother at once. She cut the sandwiches into quarters and heaped them on a plate, not speaking. Donna thought she would give it a count of twenty, and then say, in the same bored voice, that she supposed it might pass an afternoon to go out there and take a look. But it would be better if the idea came from her mother. Start counting, Donna. Twenty, nineteen, eighteen…Damn, she’s not going to say it. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen…

She had reached eleven when Maria said thoughtfully, ‘I wonder if your father would drive us out there after lunch. I don’t see why he can’t; he’s been glooming over sheets of figures for most of the morning, some fresh air will do him good.’

‘He likes glooming over sheets of figures,’ said Donna. ‘Are we having some of that quiche with the sandwiches? I’ll take Don’s out to him; he’s not likely to come in.’ She tipped some of the sandwiches onto a smaller plate.

‘Well, come straight back—’

‘Why? Were you thinking we might have a quick shag on the lawn?’

‘Don’t use words like that, Donna!’

‘Oh, join the modern age,’ said Donna, and went out to the garden.

She gave Don his lunch in an offhand way–he was plugged into his music, and barely acknowledged her–and went back to the kitchen, walking slowly as if it was too much effort to do anything else. Her parents were seated at the kitchen table eating the sandwiches, and Maria was talking animatedly about the stone tablet and the memorial clock, saying how interesting it was and that she might as well see if they could find it. She did not suppose any of them would want to come back to Amberwood again, but she had found the old watermill very interesting and would like to have another look inside it before they left.

‘You won’t mind driving down there, will you, Jim? It isn’t as if you had anything else to do.’

Donna’s father said something about a quarterly forecast to prepare, but this was swept aside on the grounds that nobody could be expected to prepare forecasts on holiday. It might rain tonight–the television had said it might–so they should do this while the sunshine lasted. They would take torches and the camera; it was only a quarter past one now. They could set off sharp at a quarter to two and have a good couple of hours. ‘Donna, you and Don had better come with us.’