The Unseen (12 page)

‘So, what’s this big announcement of yours – I’m dying to hear,’ Sam said, tucking a swathe of shiny hair behind her ear and lacing her fingers in front of her. Her expression was open but her eyes darted over Leah’s face, never quite alighting, constantly distracted.

‘Well, I’ve probably over-hyped it now. It’s not much of an
announcement, really,’ said Leah, taking a deep breath. The decision had seemed a lot bigger in her mind, when she’d made it. It had just been so long since she’d felt enthusiasm for anything – real enthusiasm, the urge to work and write. Now, speaking it aloud, it sounded feeble. ‘I’m going out of town, for a bit. Just a couple of weeks. I’m chasing down a story.’ She saw this register with some disappointment on Sam’s face, and smiled apologetically. ‘I knew I’d over-hyped it.’

‘No! I just … I thought it might be about something else. I thought maybe you’d met … somebody,’ Sam said, then flapped her hand at Leah’s crestfallen expression. ‘Forget I said it. No, I think it’s great news. Good for you – it’s high time you got your mojo back, God only knows. So, what’s the story?’

‘It’s … ah … the identity of a soldier of the First World War. He’s just been discovered over in Belgium. Only there’s more to it than that. I’m sure of it.’

‘More to him being discovered?’ Sam asked, puzzled.

‘No – more to who he is, to what he was doing in the war. To what he did in his life before it, especially. He had two letters on him which have survived – which is amazing in itself. They’re very odd letters. Perhaps you’d better read them?’ she suggested, fishing the rumpled pages from her bag.

She herself had read and reread them many times since leaving Ryan lying in the dark of his poky room, in bed sheets that smelled of her. There was something so vivid about them – she could almost feel the woman’s fear and desperation, rising like a scent from the elegant lettering; her confusion, and the frustration of being able to change nothing and discover nothing. And the odd tone of them puzzled her – clearly the pair had both been party to something very unusual, something deeply upsetting: this
crime
, in which the woman felt complicit by her silence. And yet, she wrote to him as if he were almost a formal acquaintance. She did not write as to a close friend or a family member. The imploring way in which she begged for an explanation, for information … Leah had
started to feel tremors of sympathetic panic each time she picked the letters up. And why should the soldier have kept these two letters in particular, when it sounded as though there had been many others? She’d tried to find something that the two had in common, but failed – apart from the pleading, of course, the cries for help. But surely any other letters she’d sent would also have included these?

‘You might be reading too much into that,’ said Sam, as Leah outlined her curiosity. ‘It might just be the case that he lost the others, or they were destroyed by accident, or he never got them,’ she pointed out. ‘Who knows?’

‘True.’ Leah frowned. ‘I don’t know, though. He was so careful with these ones. He sealed them so meticulously, and kept them on him even when he was fighting. It makes me doubt that he’d have accidentally lost or damaged a lot of others.’

‘Where
did
you come across all this, anyway?’ Sam asked.

Leah swirled her coffee dregs in the bottom of the cup, and neatly evaded the question. ‘So you think there’s a story in it?’ she asked instead.

‘God, yes! If you can find out what crime was committed, and even by who; and who this fella was and who the woman was … for sure there’s a story there. How did you find it, Leah?’

‘I went out to Belgium last week – that’s where I was. Someone at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission put me on to it – they’re holding his body for a while to see if I can get an ID before he’s reburied,’ she said, as casually as she could.

‘The War Graves Commission? Not Ryan? Leah – you’ve not been over to see Ryan, have you?’ Sam said, seriously. She fixed Leah with a stern stare and would not let her go.

‘Not to see him! Not specifically! He did contact me about the story, and they do want to find out who the soldier was.’ Leah tried to defend herself; but Sam’s arms were folded, her lips pressed together.

‘Tell me you didn’t sleep with him. At least tell me that,’ she
said; and when Leah didn’t answer, and could not look at her, her face fell into lines of utter dismay. ‘Oh,
Leah
! What were you
thinking?’

‘I wasn’t,’ Leah said, twisting her paper napkin till it tore. ‘I wasn’t thinking at all. I can’t seem to think, where he’s concerned. I just get … scrambled up. I’m like a mobile phone too close to a bloody microwave!’ she said, with quiet despair.

‘Which is why I thought we’d established you weren’t going to see him again. For at least a year or two. Leah – every time you see him any little bit of healing gets undone! Look at you, you look knackered.’

‘Thanks. You’re really not telling me anything I don’t know.’

‘Then why do I have to keep saying it? Leah, seriously. Ryan’s a no-go area. He cocked up big time. I mean …
big
time.’ Sam held her hands wide apart.

‘It’s not that easy. You make it sound so childish,’ Leah muttered.

‘I don’t mean to. I know how difficult it is – you know I do. And I was around to help you pick up the pieces, wasn’t I? I just … don’t want to have to do it again.’

‘I’m fine. Really, I am. I’ve got this story to work on now—’

‘Are you going to be working with Ryan on this? Are you going to be in touch?’ Sam interrupted.

‘No. No, not at all. I left without even saying goodbye. I’ve emailed him to say I’ll try to find out what I can, but that’s it. No progress reports, even. Either I’ll be able to find something out in the next few weeks, or I won’t. And whatever I find out can go in an email. I don’t need to see him again.’

‘Well, I hope you’re convincing yourself, because you sure as hell aren’t convincing me.’

‘Sam, come on. It’s the story I came to tell you about – really it was. It’s already more important to me than … what happened in Belgium. You don’t need to punish me for seeing him. For sleeping with him. Doing it was punishment enough, OK? OK?’

‘OK! Not another word. So you’re going to … where was it? Cold Arse?’

‘Cold Ash Holt.’

‘Sounds positively bucolic.’

‘Yes. It’s somewhere in Berkshire. Not quite the back of beyond, but it’ll get me out of London. A change of scene, you know. New project,’ said Leah.

‘How was he? How’s he doing?’ Sam asked, curiosity getting the better of her.

‘Unchanged. On fine form. Positively blooming.’ Leah shrugged, unhappily.

‘Where are you going to start? With the story, I mean.’

‘At The Rectory, I guess. There’s no date on the letters, but she wrote the second one once she’d found out he had gone off to fight in the war, so that’s sometime between 1914 and 1918; and the first one about three or four years before that, from what she says. So I just need to find out who was living there then, and if there were any young men of fighting age, and … whatever else I can.’ She shrugged. ‘The CWGC have already established that there were no soldiers
registered
as living there, but somebody might know something.’

If she could have got up and left right then, she would have. Talking about it made her desperate to get started, to discover what the letters’ author was so afraid of, what she could not find out. It struck Leah then that the tight despair, the desire to surrender that was captured in the letters reminded her strongly of how she felt about Ryan. She could not ease her own discomfort, but perhaps she could ease H. Canning’s. And suddenly she longed to be somewhere where there were no memories of Ryan, or of them being together; nobody who even knew Ryan existed. He was clinging to her like cobwebs, and she itched to brush them off.

Leah still lived in the flat, near Clapham Common, that she had shared with Ryan. They had lived together for four years, moved in with each other after only two months of dating. She had never
been as sure about anything ever before; and she wasn’t normally an impulsive person. A love sceptic, she would have called herself, but along had come a man who could make her feel more alive just by being in the room. He didn’t even have to touch her. She had quipped to her friends that she finally understood what pop songs were all about, but really it hadn’t been a joke. She felt like her eyes had been opened – or perhaps her heart. Like she had been let in on a huge and wonderful secret. She was positively smug, for a long time; and afterwards her inner voices kept flinging cruel adages at her – about pride coming before a fall, and there being a fine line between love and hate.

She refused to move out of the flat, which she loved and had lived in for two years before she’d even met Ryan. She would go back to living in it by herself, she resolved. It was her place again, rather than theirs, that was all. But it wasn’t true. It was saturated with him, with echoes of him being there, and memories of his touch. For weeks she could still smell him, and thought she was going mad until she realised that the bedroom curtain, near where he had stood every morning to spray on his deodorant, was giving off waves of the fragrance. She laundered the curtains at once, but not before she had crouched by the open washing machine door for twenty minutes, rocking on her heels, her face screwed into the dusty fabric.

After kissing Sam goodbye, Leah went back to the flat, packed a small suitcase, slung it onto the back seat of her car and joined the traffic queuing for the M4. It only took an hour to reach junction twelve, once she got rolling, and for some reason Leah was disappointed. Her big trip out of town, her mission, seemed belittled by how small England could be. Her satnav led her away from the main road, down a narrow, winding lane between high hedgerows still winter-brown and drab. It had been raining, and she bumped through potholes full of water, squeezing into the muddy bank and lurching to a standstill three times to let huge four-by-fours plough
past. When her satnav announced that she had arrived, she was sitting at a junction looking out over a small triangular green, with pretty, crooked houses fronting the lanes on each side. There was a large horse chestnut tree in the middle, a postbox at one corner and a phone box at the other, and no immediate signs of life. Over the rooftops of the furthest houses, Leah saw a church spire rising against the mottled sky, and felt a flare of excitement. If the dead soldier had been friends with the residents of The Rectory, he had almost certainly attended a service at that very church. She parked the car, and set off towards it. The quiet was profound, and she almost walked on tiptoes, unwilling to break it. A soft, damp breeze wandered through the naked conker tree, tapping its knuckled branches together.

The churchyard was scattered with snowdrops and early daffodils, and little purple crocuses. The usual array of village dead lay beneath headstones – old ones weathered and furred with lichen nearest the church wall, and then forward in time across the field to some brand new ones, the cuts in the turf plainly visible, lettering still razor sharp in the marble. For some reason Leah found it uncomfortable to look at these. Like catching somebody’s eye in a communal changing room, a tiny but definite invasion of privacy. The church itself was grey stone and flint, Victorian by the look of it. A battered iron cockerel stood on top of the modest spire, immobile in spite of the breeze. The door was firmly locked. Fliers advertising parish events on pastel-coloured paper curled and fluttered, held fast to the wood by rusty drawing pins. Leah twisted the flaking metal latch and gave it an extra hard shove, just to make sure, and then jumped when somebody spoke behind her.

‘It’s no good, love. It’s locked except at the weekends these days,’ a man told her, grey haired and with a heavy paunch poking out of an ancient donkey jacket. Leah caught her breath.

‘Oh, OK. Thanks,’ she said, brushing her hands on the seat of her jeans.

‘Mrs Buchanan has the key, over at number four on the green;
but I’m pretty sure she’s out at her yoga at this time of day,’ the man went on.

‘Oh well, never mind. Thanks.’ Leah smiled briefly and waited for the man to move on. He smiled back at her, and did not move. Leah had hoped to spend some more time snooping around the churchyard, perhaps even looking for some Canning headstones from the right era, but the man showed no signs of going about his business, whatever it might be. ‘Could you please tell me how to get to The Rectory?’ she asked, stifling her irritation.

‘Happy to, happy to,’ the man said. ‘You want to go left out of here and keep walking about a minute until you get to Brant’s Close. It’s on the left. It’s a new road, a cul-de-sac, with lots of houses on it. The Rectory is number two, not far after you turn off the lane. You can’t miss it …’ He followed her down the path as he explained all this, and for a moment Leah thought he would dog her steps all the way there, but at the church gate he halted.

‘Thank you!’ Leah called, striding confidently away. Oh, for the rude, unhelpful and unobtrusive people of London, she thought. The man crossed his hands on the gatepost, and watched her go.

Number two was a small brick house, a square box with a paved front driveway and a very neat little lawn. Early pansies nodded their purple and yellow faces from a row of identical pots beneath the kitchen window. A black slate plaque by the door proclaimed it to be The Rectory, and Leah rang the bell, suddenly unsure of herself.

‘Yes?’ A thin, middle-aged woman greeted her, smiling but with a hunted expression, as if she expected to come under attack at any moment. A lace doily of a woman, Leah thought at once, a little unkindly. Delicate and utterly useless looking.

‘I’m sorry, I think I’ve got this quite wrong,’ Leah said. The doily blinked rapidly, tucking her blue cardigan tighter under her arms. ‘I was looking for The Rectory – the original rectory, as it would have been, about a hundred years ago?’ she explained.

‘Oh, The Old Rectory? Yes, you’ve rather come to the wrong place, I’m afraid. It’s out the other side of the village – only five minutes’ walk. If you take the lane signposted to Thatcham, you’ll find it on the right-hand side a little further along,’ the woman told her, and began to close the door. Leah put her hand out quickly and stopped her.