Deep Water, Thin Ice (3 page)

‘They’ll have found another more interesting story soon and you’ll be forgotten.’ Victoria put her mug down on the table and rose to her feet. ‘Don’t let them get you down.’ She glanced at her watch. She still gave the impression that her time was carefully apportioned and that it was imperative that she keep to her schedule. ‘I’d better be off.’ She looked down at Alex who was staring sightlessly at her mug. ‘Remember Alex, keep busy. And…if you need anything, well, you know where I am, don’t you?’

Alex dragged her eyes up to her mother’s face and nodded. If you happen to be in, she thought, and it’s convenient.

*

Alex didn’t need telling to get back to work; it was a relief to have something to do and she threw herself back into it like a thing possessed. She caught up with recordings she’d missed and travelled to fulfil concert dates, returning, between times, to her home in Hampstead. As Victoria had predicted, the press had lost interest and it was quiet once more. When she wasn’t working she repeatedly cleaned the already spotless house or went out walking till she was weak with exhaustion. Anything was better than sitting still and thinking.

Her usually spirited and lively personality tipped into extreme highs and lows. She would laugh exaggeratedly at programmes she’d never found funny before or weep uncontrollably at sad news stories. Where normally her temper would rise quickly and then rapidly dissipate leaving her contrite and apologetic, now a wave of anger came upon her which seemed to hover just beneath the surface, permanently waiting to erupt. She felt angry with everyone - sometimes for quite trivial reasons - and struggled to contain it, even when she knew she was being unreasonable. Even her sister and her friends came under fire when they tried to be helpful and the remorse and confusion she felt at her behaviour only added to her despair. Several times a week, usually late at night when she was alone, frayed nerves, frustration and utter hopelessness would overwhelm her and she’d sob with tears until she thought she had no tears left to give, nothing left to feed this unendingly greedy worm of grief.

The nature of Simon’s death troubled her deeply and she couldn’t forget it. It had been so sudden and completely unexpected. There had been no illness or injury, serious and intractable, which had warned of her forthcoming loss. She hadn’t even been there when he’d died and that upset her badly. And the worst thing of all was the thought that he had taken his own life when she had had no idea that he was so unhappy. What kind of person did that make her and what sort of relationship did that mean they had shared? Guilt was her constant companion, a heavy weight which she dragged round with her during the day and which nearly crushed her at night.

Christmas and New Year came and went and still she worked. Then, slowly, the anger burnt itself out and she struggled to get up in the morning. At the beginning of March, in the middle of a solo in Handel’s Messiah she shuddered and fell silent. She was aware of several hundred pairs of eyes fixed on her, waiting. The orchestra kept playing, glancing uneasily at each other and then across at her but she was frozen. The other soprano soloist came to her rescue and took up the part allowing Alex to feign a bad cough and retire from the stage, distraught and mortified. Afterwards she didn’t dare go back. She was terrified of doing the same thing again.

‘You don’t want to let it bother you,’ Erica said. ‘They probably all thought you’d got the flu. You’ll be fine next time. You’ve always been nervous before performing. It was just a bad night.’

‘No,’ said Alex, shaking her head. ‘You don’t understand. It wasn’t like normal. I was…was…’ Even thinking about it made her break out in a cold sweat. ‘God, it was awful. I can’t describe how terrible I felt…like I couldn’t breathe and everything was crowding in on me. I could hardly move.’

She shut herself away. But as the days drew into weeks and her torpor and misery threatened to deepen into depression, Alex remembered an old house Simon had inherited from his wealthy widowed mother some six months before he died. An old ramshackle place, he’d said dismissively, which had been let out off and on over the years; a house which would eat money if you let it, near the sea in Devon. She wasn’t sure what made her think of it in the first place but the idea grew in her mind: to get away from the oppressive memories of London and the press who hovered expectantly again outside her gate. The thought was too appealing to be ignored.

Hillen Hall, the house was called, and when probate came through she asked the solicitor all about it. It had been empty for months, he said, told her the little he knew and gave her the keys. She took them out from time to time and weighed them thoughtfully in her hands as if they might give a clue to the nature of the house whose doors they unlocked. Early on the morning after the inquest finished – an equivocal ‘open’ verdict was finally recorded - she crammed her estate car with clothes, linens, personal items, Simon’s cello and the casket containing his ashes, grabbed a map, the keys to Hillen Hall and the solicitor’s vague directions, and headed west.

Hillen Hall stood on the side of a hill above Kellaford Bridge, a small seaside village on a rugged part of the south west coast. After a long journey with too much time to doubt the wisdom of what she was doing, Alex got out of the car and stared at it with dismay. Built of pale blue-grey stone, it had the compact proportions of a medieval manor house though it had been extended, apparently more than once, in a quite arbitrary way. More recently, it seemed, it had simply been left to decay. A huge old wisteria, not pruned for years, grew rampantly across the eastern side of the front elevation and elsewhere ivy coated the walls, its roots and tendrils drilling into the mortar and sucking it dry and friable. The flower beds were weed-ridden and unkempt, the shrubs rampant and shapeless, and the grass long enough to make hay with.

Alex struggled with the lock of the canopied front door and let herself in to a flag-stoned entrance hall from which stairs rose to the first floor. An oak-boarded door led into a cosy room to the right. To the left, a similar door opened into a large sitting room, the original Great Hall she guessed, which was as depressing as the outside. The curtains were rotten and shredded from the sun, the carpets worn and marked and the furniture stained and broken. The beautiful stone fireplace had had a succession of fires and never been cleaned with the resultant ash spilling out over the hearth, smeared and spattered by rain falling down the chimney. Weary from the driving and the procession of black thoughts and misgivings accompanying it which the radio hadn’t been able to dispel, she could have cried.

Simon had never talked about the Hall; the first she’d heard about it was when his mother died.

‘I went there on holiday once when I was a kid,’ he’d said when questioned.

‘So what’s it like?’ she’d responded, intrigued.

‘Can’t remember much about it. It’s a long time ago.’

‘But it’s let out, you said?’

‘Yes…I think so. An agency deals with it. Look, darling, do we need to go into this now?’

He was still grief-stricken and she’d reluctantly let the subject drop. To her, the inheritance of a house by the sea was a novelty. The Munroes were of humble origins; property was something you lived in. Victoria’s present wealth was the relatively recent product of cleverness and hard work – as she had often pointed out - whereas the Brooks were rich and Simon’s father had been a successful businessman. Simon didn’t squander money but he took it for granted. When his mother had died and her house in Knightsbridge was sold, despite her various and sometimes generous bequests, he had benefited from a substantial inheritance. Looking around Hillen Hall now, she wondered that he hadn’t put this place up for sale too, given how little interest he seemed to have had in it.

She wandered on. From a tiny rear lobby behind the sitting room another staircase, built of stone, twisted round upon itself in a circular column to the upper floor. Beyond it stood a large shabby kitchen and, via a utility area, access to an attached but self-contained annexe. Next to the sitting room, a dining-room extended forward in front of the rest of the house. Upstairs there were five bedrooms and a large, creaking bathroom.

But there was something about the house which Alex liked. An aura of faded charm still managed to percolate through the grime and mouse droppings and its very neglect struck a chord with her. She especially liked the end bedroom above the cosy room she thought of as the ‘snug’ downstairs. It had a window to the side looking out towards the river and another to the front. There she paused to take in the view, out down the valley towards the sea. Over tree canopies, the church tower, and the hotchpotch of village rooftops way below, away in the distance a shimmering sea reflected the clean light of the April sunshine. She pushed open the window and breathed deeply, drinking in the fresh, clear air. Somewhere in the village a car started up and then slowly negotiated the narrow, winding road out, its engine labouring up the steep incline from the harbour. On the far off horizon she thought she saw the vague, hazy shape of a ship. She felt herself slacken a little, as if a corset strung too tightly round her body had been eased out for the first time in months.

She took out her mobile to ring Erica but there was no signal. Then her eye fell on the rotten wood of the window frame coated black with mould and the desiccating bodies of dead flies on the ledge. Her lip curled in disgust and she turned away and went downstairs and outside. There had to be somewhere in the great outdoors where she could make a phone call.

*

Alex had been in Devon little more than a week when Theo Hellyon arrived in Kellaford Bridge. He swung his red Alpha Romeo over the old Roman bridge which spanned the River Kella, turned the bend and drove the sunken, banked lane a short distance towards the village before turning off right and following a pock-marked road back up the hill to The Lodge. He parked the car outside a small, high-gabled house, slid out of the driving seat, stood up and stretched. Nearly forty, of more than average height and strongly built, his skin bore the rich, even tan of someone who regularly worked outdoors. A light breeze off the sea flicked the fair, wavy hair from his forehead to reveal the beginnings of a receding hairline. He leaned back into the car, pulled out a package, and let himself in through the front door.

Sarah Hellyon was standing at the side window of her sitting room, a cut glass tumbler in her hand, when she heard the key in the lock and Theo’s familiar call. She turned as he came into the room, left the glass on the window sill, and crossed the room to meet him. They embraced warmly. The smell of whisky on her breath mingled with her favourite perfume and he glanced over her shoulder at the remaining drink in her abandoned glass. He released her and held her away from him, looking her over. She was in her early sixties now, her once blonde hair now died to look the same and neatly cut into a bob, a matronly waist inexorably replacing the hourglass figure of her youth. She was as immaculate as ever but had a slightly worn look, like a favourite jacket, its colour faded and its sleeves thin and fraying.

‘Theo darling,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you’re home. But you should have told me you were coming. I’d have got more food in.’

‘I wasn’t sure when I’d make it and I didn’t want to raise your hopes needlessly in case something went wrong.’

‘Your hair’s longer.’ She put a hand up to finger it. ‘It’s gone curly.’

‘Mm, hasn’t it? I’ve been letting it grow out. Do you like it?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘You’ll get used to it.’ He smiled and let go of her. ‘Wait there. I’ve got something for you.’ He darted back into the hallway and returned with his gift-wrapped parcel. She took it from him with a girlish smile and sat down to unwrap it, pulling back the layers of paper and tissue to reveal a long shawl of ivory lace.

‘It’s from Gozo,’ he said. ‘We stopped off there on our last trip.’

‘It’s beautiful. But you shouldn’t waste your money on me.’ She stroked it admiringly and then draped it round her shoulders and walked to the mirror above the sideboard to examine her reflection in it.

‘I don’t consider it a waste.’

Theo watched her fondly. He didn’t see his mother as often as he would have liked. Or at least he hadn’t until now.

As his mother moved away from the mirror, carefully removing the shawl and replacing it in its tissue, Theo walked to the window she’d not long left and looked out. Partly obscured by overgrown shrubs and trees and standing higher and further round the hill, it was just possible to see Hillen Hall. He was still staring up at it when she joined him, putting her arm around his waist. He put his hand down to cover hers.

‘There’s someone there,’ she said. ‘I saw a car go past about a week ago and it stayed there. It was a woman, I think.’ He looked down at her and their eyes met. He grinned.

‘I know who it is,’ he said, unable to mask the note of triumph. ‘I’ve got news. Hey, don’t look so worried. It’s good news. Make me some lunch and I’ll tell you all about it.’

*

Theo sat across from his mother at the table in her tiny dining room, eating canned tuna sandwiches on thin-sliced white bread, watching her face as she tried to grasp what he’d been telling her.

Sarah Hellyon, born Sarah Fearnly-King, was the youngest child of a much-decorated and well-heeled army colonel who’d retired to Gloucestershire. Brought up to the county life and rather spoilt, she’d married Richard Hellyon expecting to continue the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. But her life had not worked out the way she’d planned for the Hellyon money and estates were already in decline. Sharp but not bright, she had never got over the disappointment of her choice. Even so, and despite her sometimes waspish moods, she still possessed a naïve and ingenuous quality which normally Theo rather liked. At this moment however he was finding her lack of understanding frustrating. Her increasing isolation wasn’t doing her any good, he thought; she was drinking too much and becoming vague.