In Her Shadow (29 page)

‘I saw my friend Ellen,’ I said. ‘Ellen Brecht.’

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

TANTE KARLA TREATED
her brother, Pieter, Ellen’s father, to a trip to the Colston Hall in Bristol to see
Fidelio
, which was her favourite opera. They were due to return in the early hours. Mrs Todd stayed behind in Thornfield House with Ellen. The housekeeper was getting on by then, and the events of the past weeks had exhausted her. When Ellen said she was going out for a few hours, Mrs Todd didn’t even ask where she was going.

‘Be back before your father,’ was all she said, and then she probably looked forward to a few hours’ peace and quiet on her own with her knitting and the radio.

Jago met Ellen at the top of the lane. It was the first time they’d been alone together since Ellen returned from Germany. I don’t know what happened that night, but I have imagined how it must have been for them. When Jago saw her that night, emotion rose in him like the sun rising in the sky. She smiled at him, shyly. He wanted to run to her. He wanted to envelop her and be next to her, with her, for ever. In that moment, when he saw Ellen in her dark green miniskirt, her mother’s bracelets jangling at her wrists, and her arms long and smooth and brown, Jago decided to marry her. As soon as possible, as soon as she was eighteen, as soon
as they could get away from her father. He didn’t say this to Ellen because he didn’t want to overwhelm her. He had lived long enough with his uncle and aunt to learn that too much emotion can be a frightening thing.

First they went to the pub – the big one, the Trethene Arms – where nobody noticed them amongst the crowds of tourists. Jago drank cider and Ellen sipped iced lemonade, sucked the flesh from the slice of lemon and wrinkled her nose at the bitterness. Jago told her that he’d been for an interview with a marine-engineering company that had branches in America. He said he was thinking of New York. If he could get a work permit, they could go there, together. The work was hard, but the money was good. They’d be able to rent an apartment, nothing fancy, but it would be a start. He promised Ellen that whatever part of her inheritance they had to spend to set themselves up, he would pay back. That money would be hers.

Ellen said, ‘It’s not my money, Jago. It’s ours. Whatever we do, we do it together.’ She sipped her drink, then went on, ‘That money will pay for our freedom. That’s what my grandmother wanted.’

‘What about your father?’ Jago asked, and Ellen shrugged.

‘What about him? What can he do? There’s no way he can keep the inheritance from me. It’s mine. And it’ll come to me in less than eight weeks.’

When they had finished their drinks, Jago and Ellen walked back down the lane, across the churchyard, and sat on the bench behind the wall. It was June, close to the solstice, and there was still a little light in the sky at 10 p.m. Jago was tongue-tied: there was so much he wanted to say to Ellen. He did not have the words to tell her how he felt about her, how strongly he had missed her, how incomplete he felt without her. She, lost in her own thoughts, seemed, to him, uncharacteristically remote. He mirrored her quietness.
Close as they were, and despite their mutual affection, neither had the slightest understanding of what was going through the mind of the other that evening.

I was out on a date of my own that night. My mother, true to her word, had put me in touch with the grandson of her friend from church, the one who’d been gaining archaeological work experience in South America. His name was Ricky Wendon and he was a short, stocky young man with a mop of dark hair, an easy smile, dirty nails and unending enthusiasm for the Chilean excavation. He had deferred his university place for another year, so he could return to the dig in September, and saw no reason why I should not join him there. He said the dig team had been short-staffed for the last couple of months, since a couple of Swedish volunteers had returned to Stockholm. We went to the Smuggler’s Rest and on the back of a beer mat Ricky wrote the names and addresses I’d need to make the relevant enquiries about joining the dig . He was good company. He bought me one glass of cider and then another – refusing to allow me to reciprocate in a manner which I found attractive, masculine and exciting. I wondered if he was expecting me to kiss him.

Ellen and Jago lay in the grass in almost exactly the same spot where they first made love. A gentle midsummer moon was in the sky, its silver-blue light falling on their bodies. Ellen, more wide awake than she had ever been before, felt like a character in a painting. She could see the picture in her mind’s eye: the long grass almost black but dotted with pink, yellow and white flowers, the stars in the night sky, the full moon casting its light, the church in the background with its gravestones, the two pale, naked young people in the foreground like Adam and Eve. She shivered and Jago put his
arm around her and pulled her close. She felt her body pressed against his larger one. She put her hand on his thigh.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she whispered.

‘Richard Wendon is a very good name to have if you’re going to have something named after you,’ I said.

Ricky, a rather intense young man, and not quite as drunk as I was, nodded, although I don’t think he had a clue what I was talking about. His cheeks were flushed.

‘Ricardosaurus. It sounds a lot better than Hannahsaurus. That just sounds like the punchline to a very bad joke.’ I laughed rather too much.

‘Nothing has been named after me. I didn’t actually find anything new that needed a name,’ Ricky pointed out with unnecessary pedantry. ‘All I did mostly was sieve and wash the dirt off stuff that came out of the dig. It was mainly bits of rock. And I made a lot of coffee.’

‘But you were still there. You still saw an actual dinosaur in the place where it died. The last time anyone saw that creature … what was it again?’

‘Some kind of saurischian iguanodont.’

‘Exactly. Imagine, nobody’s seen it for all those millions of years and now you’re looking at it again and—’

‘Actually, Hannah, no people were around in the Late Jurassic.’

‘I know! But if they
had
been, they would have seen it. And nobody else would have seen it in the meantime until you did.’ I shook my head in awe.

‘You still can’t see much of it,’ Ricky said. ‘If you didn’t know about it, you wouldn’t even realize it was there. It’s not that impressive.’

I wasn’t really listening. I was lost in wonderment, running with the dinosaurs through a leafy Jurassic wonderland inside my mind.

‘If only I’d known you three weeks ago, Ricky, I could have written all about your work in Chile in my biology exam, and instead of failing I’d have got an A.’ I thought about this for a moment. ‘Or at least a B – or a C. At least I’d have passed.’

The pub was dark and smoky. Nothing seemed to sit straight. The floorboards were buckled, the walls were at a tilt, the narrow bench seat where Ricky perched was poised at such a severe angle that he had to lean the other way to compensate. The small wooden table rocked on its legs. Ricky shook a few peanuts out of the packet into the palm of his hand. He tipped them into his mouth. The underside of his chin was dark with stubble. I thought it was sexy. I liked the lumberjack shirt he was wearing and the dark hairs on his arms and the little white scar on the back of his hand. I had a brief, pornographic thought that had nothing at all to do with palaeontology and which I pushed aside rapidly, shocked at the filthiness of my own mind. Instead I reached out my hand and touched the fabric of Ricky’s shirt. It was warm and fuzzy and reminded me of a pair of Scooby Doo pyjamas I used to have when I was ten.

Ricky smiled at me in a reassuring way. ‘Don’t worry about your results. They don’t count for so much in South America,’ he said. ‘The professor cares more about enthusiasm and having the right attitude than qualifications.’

‘I definitely have the right attitude,’ I said. My chin slipped off the palm of my hand. ‘Oops,’ I said, and I giggled.

Jago knelt reverently beside Ellen with his hand on her belly and stared at her in the moonlight. She smiled up at him bravely although she felt like crying.

‘We’re going to have a baby?’ he asked.

‘Mmm.’

‘Oh God, that’s wonderful. That’s the most wonderful
thing that has ever happened to me. Apart from you, of course, Ellen. Apart from you.’

He leaned over and kissed Ellen’s stomach just below her belly button. Ellen turned her face to one side and squeezed her eyes tight shut.

In the car park of the Smuggler’s Rest, Ricky kissed me. His lips pressed against mine so hard it hurt, our teeth clicked, his tongue, persistent and muscular, was in my mouth. It was my first real, passionate kiss and it turned me on like a light. Ricky tugged at the waistband of my jeans. He slipped his warm hand between my shirt and my skin. Through the kissing, I tightened the muscles in my belly. His fingers found my breast beneath my bra and I gave a gasp of surprise and delight as he squeezed it gently. I hoped he wouldn’t stop there.

Ellen and Jago were dressed. They walked back through the churchyard, past the graves of the sailors and their sweethearts. Jago was so happy, so completely suffused with joy that he felt as if his feet were floating above the ground. He was conscious of the little bats that dived from the church-tower and the calls of the night-birds; he could even hear, from far away, the sea as it pounded into the land. He wished he were out there now, on the deck of the
Eliza Jane
, because only the sea was big enough to measure his happiness. Ellen, slightly ahead of him, walked with her head bowed.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Jago. He leaned forward and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’ll look after you. Both of you. I won’t let anything bad happen. It’ll be all right.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘How can it not be? We have one another, we’re having a baby, we’re going to be a family. We’ll go away together. We can go tomorrow …’

‘After my birthday.’

‘After your birthday then – whenever, as soon as you like.’

‘If my father finds out I’m pregnant …’

‘Shhh, shhh, honey.’ Jago pulled on Ellen’s shoulder to make her stand still. He turned her towards him. He took her beloved face in his hands.

‘How will he find out?’ he asked. ‘Who will tell him? Does anyone else know?’

Ellen shook her head. ‘I haven’t even told Hannah.’

‘That’s OK then,’ said Jago. ‘We’ll be careful. We’ll be all right. It’s only a few weeks to your birthday. We’ll be fine.’

In Ricky’s little car, I put my head back and laughed. I felt flushed, exhilarated, happy – as if I’d been for a run or won a prize. Ricky kissed me once more, then climbed off me, back into the driver’s seat, and fastened his fly.

‘Wow!’ he said, pushing the hair out of his eyes. ‘Hannah, that was something else.’

I sighed contentedly. I could feel my hair spread out on the back of the seat, I knew my clothes were in disarray and the windows of the car were steamed up and it must have been rocking away in the pub car park, in its corner space by the wall, like something out of a comedy sketch. Anyone might have seen. They probably did. I didn’t care. I didn’t feel used or sleazy or anything at all except happy, happy, happy.

From somewhere, Ricky produced the johnny and tied a knot in the end, pinging the rubber.

I found this funny too.

‘Can’t I keep it?’ I asked. ‘As a souvenir?’

‘You’re crazy-amazing!’ said Ricky, and he wound down the window and threw it expertly into the bin by the wall.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

BECAUSE I HAD
almost got us both killed, and because after that we both needed a drink, John and I never made it to the dinner at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Instead, we ended up in a small back street bar. John took off his bow tie and stowed it in his pocket, and I put on my cardigan and unclipped my hair, letting it fall loose around my shoulders. I found a table by the wall while he went to the bar and returned with two bottles of beer, which he banged down. He scraped back the chair and sat opposite me, his knees wide apart, one on either side of the table.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Hannah, please will you explain what’s going on.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘You thought you saw your friend, but you know your friend is dead. So why did you run across the road? You knew it couldn’t be her. You
knew
! And, Hannah, that was pretty damn scary!’

‘I’m sorry. We’d just been talking about going to Magdeburg, hadn’t we, you and I. Ellen was in my mind. And when I saw her – when I
thought
I saw her – I forgot about everything. I just wanted to reach her. I’ve been thinking … Lately I’ve been wondering if she might still be alive.’
I looked up at him. ‘Maybe there was some kind of mix-up. Perhaps Ellen never died.’

‘Christ,’ said John. He exhaled and ran a hand through his hair.

‘I know it sounds a bit … unlikely.’

‘Just a bit.’

‘You don’t understand – Ellen’s life was complicated.’

‘Even so, Hannah, what are you suggesting? That she faked her own death?’

‘I don’t know.’

I picked at the label on the beer bottle.

‘Ellen and I were so close.’ I held two fingers pressed together up to demonstrate. ‘This close, perhaps almost
too
close. I don’t think I’ve ever really believed she was dead. I couldn’t understand how she could leave me; how she could not
be
any more. It has never made sense to me.’

John sighed. He took a drink from the bottle. ‘Is that why you want to go to Magdeburg? To look for answers there?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

John stared at his beer.

I picked up my bottle. The little paper doily was stuck to the bottom. I peeled it off, drank. The bar was jolly, like an advert for Germany, with big mirrors on the walls and scores of lights with red-and-gold glass shades. The bar staff were wearing long green aprons tied at the waist, white shirts and black trousers, and everything was shiny. The fancy gold lettering on the large plate-glass windows cast shadows across the table, and John’s shirt.