Spiderweb (17 page)

On many of these days she is with Alan Scarth, as the summer pitches ahead, open-ended, perilous.

‘Listen,’ says Stella. ‘If I married you, we’d be eyeball to eyeball, day in, day out. With both of us the people we are. Think of it.’

There is a gleam of satisfaction in his eye. A foxy look. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘That’s what I want to hear. If …’

‘Purely hypothetical,’ says Stella. ‘I’m merely trying to make you see why it’s got to be out of the question.’

‘You’re failing entirely,’ says he. ‘And you with all that academic training. Now I’m just a simple man, but I know a good proposition when I see one.’

Simple, indeed, thinks Stella. Simple my foot. Clever, resourceful, ingenious. Straightforward. Complex. At this precise moment – disarming, persuasive.

‘Look,’ she says. ‘I work. What would I do here?’

He has thought of that. He is one step ahead. You could come and go, he tells her. Go south when you need to. Do your field trips. Come back up here for your writing, your studying. I’d settle for that.

She pounces. Maybe you would, she says to him, but would everyone else? It’s not the way things are done up here and you know that. I’d be the weak link and you’d suffer for it.

‘Then I’ll suffer gladly,’ says he. ‘If need be. But I think you’re wrong. You’d fit here well enough.’

‘Look at us now,’ says Stella. ‘We’re quarrelling.’

‘All married people quarrel,’ says he.

‘Why me?’ she asks him. ‘When there’s half the girls in Orkney after you. Or so I’m told.’

‘Because you’re not like any woman I ever met. Because you’ve got red hair, so you belong here anyway.’

Occasionally Stella reminds herself that the rest of the world exists by writing a letter, or a postcard. She writes a letter to her friend Judith, who is digging up the past somewhere in Turkey. She sends a postcard to her friend Nadine. There is a choice of three cards in the island shop: sunset over Scapa Flow, puffins on a crag, or female seal with pup. She selects the seals and writes a message on the back which may or may not stir in Nadine a memory of a conversation they once had, way back, time out of mind ago, when they were quite other people, when all the roads lay open, when choice was so prodigal that it held no terrors.

Sometimes when she is with Alan Scarth the air is taut with what is not said. Sex is unspoken, but it is ripe between them. It is a sizzling force-field to be skirted, it is the silent sub-text. Marry me, he says, and he means it. Come to bed with me, he does not say, because this is more important than immediate gratification and he has the long view in mind. But she can feel him reined in, tense with control. And sometimes it is as much as she can do not to reach out, to put a hand on his burning flesh, to say – yes, me too, you are not alone in this.

Does she love him? All she knows is that some cautionary instinct tells her it would never do, it would come undone, it would scupper them both. In the midst of all this heightened time there is a sane and fatal voice which tells her, no. You wouldn’t last, not the way you are. The two of you would never last, with him the way he is, with this place the way it is.

‘So you’ll not marry me,’ says Alan Scarth.

She is silent. Time has run out. The summer has fetched up against autumn. She has her bags packed, her notebooks, her card indexes. She would pack what she is feeling, too, if she could, this hard cold lump in the belly.

‘You’ll regret it,’ says he.

‘Possibly. Probably, even. But we’d both regret it even more if I did. Believe me.’ She cannot look at him so she looks instead at the sea cliff, from which the birds are now gone, the mob, the multitude, that teeming life. Just a few left, floating against the rock face, skimming the waves.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. The words break in the middle – she hears her voice as though it were someone else’s.

He reaches out to her. The first time. He takes her hand in his. ‘There it is, then,’ he says. ‘There it is, then, Stella.’

When Stella thought now of those months, they had still that sense of a continuous present. And Alan Scarth was frozen in her head as he was then – that fiery, potent giant of a man in the prime of his life. Herself she could not see, because that Stella was eclipsed entirely by subsequent Stellas and above all by the Stella of today, who confronted her from the mirror, features distorted by age, body softened and sagging. Very occasionally, she would be shocked to think that he also, if he was out there still, must now be thus.

She had never been back to the island. For a year or two after that summer they had exchanged occasional letters, and then the exchange had shrunk to anodyne postcards written by Stella, to which he ceased to reply. And it was better so, she would think. By now one of those opportunist local lasses must have got her way, and good luck to her. More fool me, perhaps.

Except that she had known herself to be driven by some submerged wisdom. She could mourn that lost experience, the vibrancy of that summer, the person that she had been, but she could not anguish over a mistake. The time shone out now as one of heightened living, not as lost opportunity.

There it is, she thought. As he said. There it is. I had my chance to belong – to belong to someone, to belong somewhere. And passed it up. For good reason. Knowing myself. Knowing the expectations of a place like that, which I could not have met.

She drove away from Kingston Florey with her head full of that other community, far more inflexible, far more impregnable. She had been intending to go back to the cottage, where the dog was shut in and would be desperate for an outing. But as she reached the entrance to the track, she changed her mind. It was hot, a walk up the mineral line seemed suddenly unappealing – overgrown at this time of year and the bracken full of flies. The dog could wait until later in the day. She would visit Judith at her dig.

The Hiscox boys on their bikes were just turning into the track as she passed. She smiled again and lifted her hand from the wheel in greeting. They swung their heads sideways and glared at her. She remembered the mocking adolescents. Poor little tykes.

There’d been a bunch of them on the green – two people from school and others they didn’t know. And girls. Stupid cows. Michael and Peter tried to get past quickly but the others saw them. They’d known what would come and it did. Shouting things about their fucking bikes. And about them, too. And the girls hearing and laughing. Silly fucking cows. And then they’d seen the woman from the cottage and she was grinning away too and saying something.

Afterwards they told each other that they should have ridden into her. Given her something to think about.

They didn’t give a shit about girls anyway. Some of the boys at school went on about it all the time. Who they’d done it with, how often they’d done it. So what? What was the big deal?

Stupid bitches.

They rode back and then just before they turned off the road into the lane, there she was again, the woman from the cottage, driving past. Looking towards them and pointing. Grinning. Pointing at their bikes.

She didn’t turn in to go home but went off down the main road and when she was out of sight, Peter looked over his shoulder at Michael and said, ‘You seen that? You seen what she did?’

‘Yeah. She’ll be sorry. We’ll see to it she’s sorry.’

They went to the cottage without really knowing what they were going to do, except that she wasn’t there, so there’d be something they could do. She’d driven off, so it was safe enough. They walked around to the back, thinking that they’d maybe break a window. The stupid dog was scrabbling away at the glass doors into the garden, barking. Peter rattled at the handle to get it worked up and to their surprise the door opened. It wasn’t locked. The dog flew out, barking and jumping up. Michael kicked it, as hard as he could, catching it a good thump in the belly and it belted off, squealing. They watched it run into the lane. And then Peter shut the door again and they made off. They knew suddenly what they were going to do. They didn’t even have to talk about it.

‘I’m really glad you’ve come,’ said Judith. ‘I was feeling somewhat pissed off. I can see the end of this dig looming, for one thing. It seems impossible to screw another penny from anywhere and the building society is starting to breathe very heavily indeed. The pin-stripes are running out of patience and polite interest. Trouble is, I can’t guarantee to come up with anything persuasively crucial in the immediate future. Burial ground? No such luck, I’m afraid. We’ve got the basic plan now, and some tiles and other bits and pieces, and they’re going to close in on me and insist on their wretched squash court going ahead. I’d need weeks and months to be able to prove that there’s more that should be excavated, which there probably is. So I can see the whole thing fizzling out, which is a shame. Other thing? Oh, well … life in general, I suppose, put it that way. I’m getting to the point where … Here, I’m not going to pile any of that on you … So how are things? Good, good. You’re looking very buoyant, if I may say so. Positively glowing. All in the mind, you say? Well, bully for you. It certainly suits you, whatever you’ve been mulling over. Hang on, I’ll tell the kids they can take a break and we’ll go to the pin-stripes’ canteen and get a bite to eat.’

Michael shot the dog. They found it again quite quickly -stupid thing was wandering around by the track up to the hill and when it saw them, it came rushing up, tail wagging and all. Michael was the one holding the gun, so it was he got to shoot it. The first shot didn’t kill it and it was thrashing around screaming, so Peter took the gun and gave it two more. They didn’t have to worry about anyone hearing because their mother had gone to Taunton and their father was out on a job up on the Brendons.

Then they didn’t know what to do. They felt good and they’d be one up on that silly old cow for ever now, but they could see this might mean trouble, one way or another. They couldn’t leave the dog where it was, so they carried it a little way up the mineral line and stuffed it into the overgrown ditch. The woman would think it had just got out and run away. Got done for by a car or something.

But they’d know what really happened. Like they knew about other things.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Stella. ‘I’m not talking about nostalgia, sentiment – that stuff. What I mean is … fishing out good times and … having a sort of re-run. It can give you such alift … the peculiar way it’s all still
there
. Not you? Oh, come on, it’s just because you’re feeling down. Think of Malta, that year. No, I wasn’t, as it happens. Another time and place. Well, yes, someone else, if you like. No, the list of my past loves is not inexhaustible, what nonsense. Definitely finite. And in this case … But the point is this business of emotion recollected in tranquillity. Contradiction in terms? I disagree. Though, all right, maybe it’s not tranquillity, exactly … Clarity, more. You see the thing clearly, which you don’t at the time, when it’s all helter-skelter feelings. I don’t know why I’m going on like this. Well, you started me off … Anyway, I must go – I left the dog shut in and he’ll be frantic. No, he’s not a mistake, I like him, and anyway he gives me street credibility. I have a house, I have a significant domestic relationship, I’m a paid-up citizen for the first time in my life. And listen, I’m sorry about this dig folding up. It’s really too bad. And whatever else it is you’re … anyway, look, keep in touch, right?‘

‘Dogs do not open doors,’ said Stella. ‘Someone has been here.’

The policeman had patrolled both house and garden. She agreed with him that there was no indication of any break-in.

‘And you’re quite certain that the dog was shut in before you went out?’ he said.

Stella hesitated – a small but perhaps betraying hesitation, which occurred not so much because she was in any doubt but because, if asked a question, she was in the habit of giving it due consideration. She saw at once in the policeman’s face that he felt this whole matter to be a touch unsound. He closed his notebook, switched on his mobile phone and listened to a few seconds of unintelligible crackling. He was already moving on to the next local difficulty.

‘It’s conceivable that I forgot to bolt the French windows. But they certainly weren’t left open.’

‘I do advise you to lock up securely in future. Window locks would be a good thing, and a mortice on the front door. We’ll be in touch if anything’s heard of the dog. You could put an ad in the paper, someone may have spotted him …’

She saw him out, watched the police car turn towards the main road. Then she went and scoured the area again. Up the mineral line, right to the top. Nothing. The road, she thought. Undoubtedly. Picked off in the traffic. Poor little beggar. Oh, shit … She had already toured the lane, asking if anyone had seen the dog, and drawn a blank with each enquiry. There was no one around at the Hiscox place.

She would not have believed that you could feel so stricken. About an animal, for heaven’s sake. The silence in the cottage, that evening. The void where there should have been that small, insistent presence. At one point she found her eyes welling with tears and was astonished. It came to her that there was an entire dimension of human emotion of which she had been ignorant. People were going through this on all sides and one had never realized. Cats, dogs, budgerigars, hamsters, heaven knows what. All leaving a bleak space in someone’s life, triggering this disproportionate, lunatic response in otherwise balanced and reasonable adult women. And men, one must suppose.

She searched the fields again, walked again up the mineral line. She drove back and forth along the main road, looking fearfully for some dark bundle on the verge.

‘But it’ll just come back, won’t it?’ said Judith. ‘Isn’t that what dogs do? One’s always reading about it in the tabloid press. People move house and the family pooch miraculously navigates a hundred miles down the MI to the old place. That’s cats? Well, I don’t know about either, I must admit, and I’m sorry you’re so cut up about it, but I mean, you’d only had it a few months … Sorry, sorry – no, I can see I don’t understand, so I’d better shut up. I’m sure it’ll reappear. Well, two days isn’t
that
long …‘

‘You’ve advertised in the local paper?’ said Richard. ‘And a notice in the shop … right. Was it pedigree? I mean, would anyone want to steal it? Definitely not … well, that’s all to the good, I imagine. Look, it may well turn up yet. Six days … Oh, I see. Look, I was calling in fact to say, should I come over to fix the mower? Well, no, I can see that under the circumstances your thoughts have not centred on grass-cutting, but life has to go on, I suppose. Oh dear, I didn’t mean to sound brisk … No, we never had a dog. Any day this week I could do … Friday afternoon. Maybe you’ll have had good news by then, who knows …‘

The boys were in their room when the policeman came to the bungalow. It was quite early in the morning. She was getting breakfast – their father was in the kitchen too. They saw the police car from the window, saw the man get out, come up the path. Heard the knock. He’d come about the fires. Must have. He was in the kitchen now – they could hear voices. They went into the passage, quietly, and stood stock still behind the door, listening, their guts creeping. And then they heard her say, ‘What dog? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ The boys understood now and their stomachs went back to normal. It was about the stupid dog – the woman’s dog – and that didn’t matter, at least not so much. They’d just say they didn’t know anything about it, like she was.

The policeman said the dog had been reported missing and now someone walking up the mineral line had found its body. Another dog found it, sniffing around. Dog was shot, said the policeman. Dog belonging to the lady at Vine Cottage. Making enquiries. List at the station showed gun licence in the name of T. G. Hiscox.

She let fly. That really got up her nose. A policeman walking in like that. We don’t know anything about any dog. What’s it got to do with us if the dog got shot up on the mineral line? Plenty of people shooting around here, aren’t there?

On and on. And the policeman backing off now, he wanted out. And then their father came into it. We don’t know anything about anyone’s sodding dog. Anything gets shot around our place it’s the bloody pigeons, that’s all. That’s what the gun’s for, isn’t it? What’s the fact that I’ve got a gun have to do with this dog getting shot?

The policeman seemed to feel the same, apparently, because he asked to check the gun licence and then went off.

The boys came into the kitchen. They were both thinking that they’d keep quiet, that would be the best thing. Just keep their heads down and there’d be no aggro.

Their father sat down and went back to his breakfast. That was that, far as he was concerned. But she was looking at them. Looking in a way they didn’t like.

‘You know anything about that dog?‘

They stood there, mouths slammed shut. Michael shrugged. Say nothing and they’d be OK. It would be something else they knew about and no one else.

She went out of the room. Into the office. Came back, at once, and they saw in her face that she knew. How could she? Neither of them spoke. They thought it, and she saw them thinking.

‘Because you put it back the wrong way round, you stupid little gits. I can see someone’s had it out.’

Now their father had banged down his knife and fork. They hit the wall, both of them. Who said you could use that gun? Fucking idiots. How dare you? What the hell did you think you were doing?

They still weren’t going to say. But there was no point now. No one was going to believe them, whatever they said. Might as well not bother. Except Peter did. ‘We was going to get you some pigeons, that’s all. We never saw the stupid dog. Got nothing to do with us. We went out after pigeons.’

‘Shut up!’ She got in front of him, had him pinned up against the table. ‘Shut up, you! Just shut up, shut up, shut up!’ Her face was inches from his, her staring eyes, the smell of her breath. ‘Who asked you to go after pigeons? Since when do you decide what’s done around here?’ Her voice screeching in his ears. They’d been hearing that voice since before they could remember, since before they could understand what she was saying. Shut up. Do this. Do that. Stupid little beggars.

Their father said, ‘You’d better get lost before I belt the pair of you.’

She stepped away from Peter suddenly. Went from raging to ice cold in one moment, like she could. ‘That’s right. Get lost and stay lost, then we wouldn’t have you round our necks. Put the kettle on, Ted, I want some more tea.’

They went. They got on the bikes and rode away. They’d go to Minehead, to the amusement arcades and she’d never bloody know, would she? Then they remembered they hadn’t got any money. So they rode up and down the road for a long time and then they went and sat in a field and eventually it was beginning to get dark so they went home. Their parents were watching television. They didn’t look up. ‘You again,’ she said. And the boys went upstairs. They hadn’t had anything to eat all day but it didn’t seem to matter.

‘Have you any idea who could be responsible?’ said Richard.

Stella shrugged. ‘Someone let him out, it would seem, and then … I must have left the french windows unlocked.’

‘Was anything taken?‘

She shook her head. ‘Nothing at all, so far as I’m aware.’

‘Would the dog have attacked the intruder – tried to see him off?‘

‘Inconceivable. He welcomed one and all.’

‘I remember.’ Both now recalled Richard repelling Bracken’s fawning approaches with irritation. ‘In that case,’ Richard went on, ’the shooting of the dog would seem to have been the prime intention.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Surely no one from round about …’

‘There are a couple of boys,’ said Stella reluctantly. ‘Sons of the people at the agricultural contractors. The parents are civil enough, but the lads are distinctly surly. Conceivably it was them. But we shall never know and I don’t intend to pursue the matter.’

‘How very unpleasant. I’m so sorry.’

He was, Stella could see. Quite toppled from his usual brisk application to the matter in hand. He put his tool-kit down on the kitchen table and stood looking at her. Then he reached out and held her upper arm for a moment, a gesture that she found unsettling rather than consolatory.