Winter Solstice (47 page)

I must be more enterprising. I can take care of myself. I know about things like Ecstasy tablets at parties; and about drunks and druggies and flashers and sex maniacs and homely old men who come and talk to you at bus stations.

Perhaps I should think about going to a co-educational boarding-school to do my A levels. Last two years of school. I’d never thought of that. I shall put the idea into Mummy’s head, and make her talk it through. I shall get Miss Maxwell-Brown on my side. And that would only be two years away.

Just having something new to plan and look forward to makes me feel much more determined.

I wish I had a brother like Rory.

No, I don’t. Because if he was my brother it wouldn’t be the same.

My earrings don’t hurt. When Gran and Mummy see them, they will know that I have changed. That I am doing what I want. That I can make my own decisions. I’m not a little child any more.

They had someone for tea here called Sir James Erskine-Earle. He has taken Elfrida’s clock to value it for insurance. Carrie said he ate six scones.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life.

Sam opened his eyes to darkness and bitter cold. It was the cold that had woken him, and he realized that his eiderdown quilt had slipped off the bed and he was shivering beneath the inadequate comfort of two blankets and an icy, monogrammed linen sheet. The curtains at his window were, as always, drawn back, and the window open-though not very wide-and a blast of air assailed him, chill as the sensation on opening a deep freeze. During the night, it was obvious the temperature had dropped to an uncomfortable low.

He heaved himself over, reached down for the quilt and dragged it back into place. He was still cold, but its soft, downy weight was a comfort. Waiting for warmth, he reached out a hand, turned on his bedside light, and looked at his watch. Half past seven in the morning.

His room, by now familiar, lay about him, the corners deep in shadow. There was not much furniture. A huge wardrobe, which contained all he at the moment possessed, and a Victorian wash-stand doing duty as a dressing-table. It had a liver-coloured marble top, and on it stood a large flowered bowl and a ewer for water. The only mirror was inside the wardrobe door, and there was one small, ornate chair. Not a room for working in, nor a room for sitting in, but perfectly adequate for the business of sleeping.

And making business-like calls on his mobile phone.

He lay, thawing slowly, and wondered why it all rendered him such satisfaction. He decided that the proportions of the room were exactly right; the empty walls undemanding, the threadbare curtains of faded cretonne, long enough to lie in festoons upon the worn carpet, reminiscent of his mother’s curtains in the old house at Radley Hill. They were hung by brass rings, upon a brass pole with pineapple filials, and when drawn made a satisfactory clatter.

This sound brought back the sound of his mother’s voice.

“Darling, wake up. It’s nearly time for breakfast.”

Nostalgia, perhaps, but at its best.

The whole house was the same. The spaciousness, the handsome half-empty rooms, with their elaborate cornices and tall panelled doors. The shallow-stepped staircase, rising in flights to the attics, with its banister of polished Baltic pine, the oldfashioned but perfectly recognizable kitchen; the bathrooms panelled in white-painted tongue-and-groove, complete with original Victorian fittings, and lavatory cisterns with chains and handles with pull written on them.

It had all felt, from that very first embarrassing evening, a bit like coming home.

From the first moment, the house had appealed to Sam. Spoken to him, welcomed him. He thought back over the extraordinarily coincidental chain of events that had brought him here, at this particular time, and then left him marooned, so that he had no choice but to stay. With hindsight, it seemed as though it had all been carefully mapped out by fate. Some-hopefully benign-being; the influence of his star sign, perhaps, or the incomprehensible magnetism of ancient lay lines.

Meeting Hughie McLennan in London had been the first link in the chain. Being handed the key of Hughie’s house in Creagan. Tossing a coin as he had sat in his car outside the church hall in Buddy. If it had come up heads, he would have driven straight back to Inverness, and in all likelihood would have been able to traverse the road across the Black Isle before the snow rendered it impassable. But instead it had come up tails, and he had diverted, in order to drive to Creagan.

If Sam had found the house shuttered and unoccupied, as he expected it to be, he would not have dallied. Simply locating the place was all he had had in mind, and its position, size, and air of solid Victorian dignity would have been enough to ensure that he return for a more detailed viewing. But it hadn’t been empty. Lights had blazed from upstairs windows, and, with curiosity aroused, he had left his car by the pavement’s edge, walked up the path, and rung the bell.

After that, he had been caught, and there was no going back.

Now he had lived here for two days, in the company of four other vaguely connected people, and would be staying until after Christmas was a thing of the past. He had intended spending this time sorting out his own private priorities for the mill, working with laptop and calculator. But idleness had been forced upon him, on account of laptop, calculator, files, essential telephone numbers, and papers all having been left behind in his hotel room in Inverness. All he had brought to the meeting in Buckly were his mobile phone, a slim briefcase, and the key to the Estate House.

Because work was impossible, he had found it extraordinarily easy to switch off and slow down into a state of mind that he had not experienced for years. Horizons shrank. Priorities were altered. It felt a little like being on board a ship, isolated from the rest of the world but intensely involved with the other passengers. Strangers who were slowly becoming as close as the family he no longer possessed. The house, like that ship, contained them all, and did so with a certain grace, as though content to have the spacious rooms filled once more-doors standing open, fires lighted, voices calling, footsteps on the stairs.

A good house, and Sam wanted it. That was the problem. He wished to buy it from Hughie and Oscar, and have it for his own. Its location was perfect…. It would take him only twenty minutes, no more, to drive the empty roads to the mill each morning, and home again at the end of the day’s work. He could step out of the front door and walk to the Golf Club. Short of a can of beer or a loaf of bread or a pint of milk, he only had to cross the square to the little supermarket.

As well, it would be a house with a future. His future. Owning it, Sam would never have to leave. Unlike a tiny terrace house, or a picturesque, rose-smothered cottage, it was capable of accommodating anything he chose to throw at it. It was this awareness of longevity that most attracted him. He would soon be forty. He didn’t want to go on moving; buying and selling, starting anew. He wanted this to be the last start. He wanted to stay. Here.

But half of it belonged to Oscar Blundell, and this was where he and Elfrida lived. It, and each other, seemed to be all they had. A dull fellow, Hughie had told Sam. My cousin is a dull fellow. But Sam didn’t think Oscar was dull in the tea st He liked him enormously and this made nothing easier.

If Sam had been Hughie, he would have kept his mouth shut about Elfrida’s little picture. He would never have taken the trouble to telephone Janey in London and find out the whereabouts of the local Boothby’s representative, Sir James Erskine-Earle. The thought of selling the painting had occurred to Elfrida, but she was so vaguely unworldly about practical matters that she would never have got around to doing anything dynamic on her own. At the end of the day, the visit from James Erskine-Earle had solved nothing, because the painting was a fake. So they were all back where they had started. In a way Sam wished the David Wilkie had been rare, authentic, and worth a million, so that he could put his own pipedreams away and go off and look for somewhere else to live.

And yet… he couldn’t get rid of the feeling that here, in this square, unadorned, solid Victorian town house, he was destined to settle and spend the rest of his days.

Useless reflections. With some effort he put them out of his mind and got out of bed to close the window. His room was at the back of the Estate House, and in the light of the street lamp which stood by the wooden gate he saw the terraced garden, climbing up to the stand of pines, all petrified with cold, glittering with frost. There was not a breath of wind. No sound.

As a boy in Yorkshire, he had from time to time risen very early and gone out for a long hike, up into the moors to some elevated crag from which he could watch the sun rise. No dawn was quite the same as another, and the filling of the sky with light had always seemed a miracle. He remembered returning home after these early expeditions, running down grassy paths and leaping streams, bursting with high spirits and energy, aware that much of his happiness came of knowing that a huge breakfast would be waiting for him when he finally got home.

It was a long time since he had watched a sunrise. Today, the shortest day of the year, was perhaps as good a morning as any to repeat the experience. He dressed, laced his boots, pulled on his Barbour, felt in the pockets for his thick leather driving gloves. He went quietly out of his room, closing the door behind him with elaborate care, and then downstairs. In the empty kitchen, he found Horace snoozing in his basket.

“Want a walk?”

Horace, recovered from his encounter with the Rottweiler, did. Sam found Elfrida’s shopping list and scribbled a note to her, and then went down the hall and took from the coat-stand his tweed cap and a muffler which did not belong to him but felt comforting knotted around his neck. He turned the key of the front door and opened it, and stepped out into the still, dark, paralysing cold of the morning. Iced snow crunched beneath his boots. As he opened the gate, he heard the sound of an engine and saw the great gritting lorry, headlights beaming, snow-plough secured, lumber across the square and down the street towards the main road.

Sam and the dog set off in the other direction.

They went by way of the Golf Club and the beach, leaving the street lamps of the town behind them. The sky was clear, and a single star hung in the dark heavens, but a mist lay along the distant margins of the sea. The tide was far out, the sand frozen, and shallow rock-pools hard as iron. The wind, stirring from the north, had an edge to it like a knife, and he pulled the soft folds of his muffler up and around his chin. He thought of other lands on this latitude, only a bit south of sixty degrees. To the west, beyond the Atlantic, Labrador, the Hudson Bay. To the east, Scandinavia and the wastes of Siberia. There, a man stepping out of doors for five minutes in midwinter would probably freeze to death. And yet, here he was, striding like any holiday-maker down a beach with a dog at his heels, and not unduly perturbed by the cold.

The Gulf Stream was, indeed, a marvelous invention.

At a brisk pace, he covered the length of the beach, and then turned inland. He climbed over the dunes, crossed the track, the two fairways of the golf course, and then strode up the steep slope that lay beyond, a winding path which led uphill between thick clumps of gorse. By the time he reached the top he was warm with exertion, and Horace panting furiously. He came to a fence and a stile. By now the dark of the sky had paled to grey, and the star was gone. He leaned against the stile, sheltered from the north by the thick wind-break of the gorse, and turned to face the sea. He saw the long line of the horizon, the bay sweeping out to the point where the lighthouse still blinked. Beyond it, to the south-east, the sky was stained with pink, the coming light diffused by mist. It was as good a viewpoint as any. He looked at his watch and saw that it was eight-forty. He sat on the wooden step of the stile and waited.

The dog sat at his knee. Sam pulled off his glove and laid his hand on the dog’s head and touched the soft, silky fur, the velvety ears. The world, the empty universe belonged, at that moment, to just the two of them. From this small elevation, it seemed limitless, new-minted, pristine, as though only yesterday had been the day of the Creation.

He remembered, for no particular reason, that afternoon in London when he had walked down the King’s Road in the wet dusk, the streets clogged with shoppers and traffic, and told himself that there was no person in the world who would expect a Christmas present from him. So he had arrived in Creagan totally unprepared. But now he must, sometime, get busy, so that on Christmas morning he would have packages to hand out. Four of them. There were four. Or maybe five, including the mysterious Mrs. Snead, whom he had not yet encountered. Oscar, Elfrida, Lucy, Carrie.

Carrie.

Losing Deborah, closing up the apartment, leaving New York and returning to London and his new job, the last thing on his mind had been the possibility of another woman coming into his life. Right now, he needed an emotional involvement as much as he needed a hole in the head. But Carrie had been waiting for him, the last link on that extraordinary chain of coincidences, compounding the sensation that he was a helpless pawn in fate’s game. He had walked, in the snow, through the gate of the Estate House, up the path, and pressed the bell. And it was Carrie who, eventually, had opened the door to him.

Carrie, with her smooth cap of chestnut hair, her dark and expressive eyes, her slenderness, her long neck. Her slanting eyebrows, the fascinating mole at one end of her mouth. Her voice, deep-toned, with an underlying suggestion of laughter, so that he could never be sure when she teased or when she was serious. Her wrists were narrow, her hands long-fingered and capable, with unpainted nails, and she wore on her right hand an antique sapphire-and-diamond ring which looked as though it might have once been pressed upon her by some besotted man, mad to marry her. Or perhaps left, as a bequest, by an adoring elderly relation.