‘Hello,’ he said with a puzzled smile, ‘can I help you?’
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Were you asleep!’
‘Asleep? No, no. Oh. Oh dear, yes, perhaps I was.’ He looked around and seemed to find nothing particularly unusual in that. ‘I think we must have been having a little nap. Been for a walk you see. Did you want something?’
‘You’re in the middle of the road.’
‘Bless my soul, are we? I’m so sorry. Did you hear that Em? We’ve been asleep. In the road.’ Em showed no sign of waking.
‘Look I’m in a hurry,’ said Beth. ‘Can you just pull over and let me by.’
‘Let me see, yes, of course, of course,’
Beth got back in her car and the car in front started to move, but instead of pulling over, it meandered off again in the same direction as her and she swore viciously. Then it occurred to her that it really didn’t matter. She couldn’t have been in less of a hurry. No one knew she was coming and she didn’t even want to arrive. It was just that there was nowhere else to go. As the road became still narrower, the car in front suddenly put on an unwise burst of speed and shot off out of sight, suggesting that some physical need more urgent than sleep had overtaken its occupants. Beth didn’t speed up. The lane she was now driving down, and it was no more than that, should have been intensely familiar. She had walked it a thousand times in her childhood when it had been the lane home, but that didn’t help. She recognised it as if someone had spent many hours describing it to her, not as if she had lived there for two thirds of her life. Adding to that feeling of disjuncture, she caught a momentary glimpse through a gap to her right of something genuinely unfamiliar, a large house down in the valley below the road where she had no memory of such a place. Then it was too late for unfamiliarity because she was coming down the hill. Slapton, steep, cramped Slapton crowded in on her, and there ahead, looming over the cottages with its squadrons of rooks flying around the ivy wrappings of its derelict battlements, was the dark tower which was all that remained of Slapton Chantry.
The main road was a twisting gulley running down between stone walls as the village came rushing in to smother her, and when she finally found a tiny gap to squeeze the car into, she sat in it and waited for the courage to do what came next.
The front door of Carrick Cottage opened straight on to the road and the flaking blue paint on the door was just as it had always been. Beth looked to the side and saw the same frayed blue curtains. She put her finger to the bell, then hesitated and ran her hand up and down the stones beside the door until she found the gap where the key used to be hidden. It was no longer there. No one else needed it these days. For a moment she was the child who had lived there, but only for a moment. She rang the bell just as a stranger would.
The man who came to the door was not at all as he had always been. He had changed so much that for a moment she thought he was someone else. He was two stone lighter than when she had last seen him, but despite that he had put on far more years than the calendar showed. He looked at her as if he were equally bemused.
‘Beth?’ he said, ‘It’s Beth!’ and she saw a gleam of moisture appear immediately in the corner of each eye.
‘Hello Dad,’ she said and, being unable to kiss him, she put out both her hands and took his as they stared at each other.
‘I didn’t think you’d come,’ he said, ‘being so busy.’
She wondered if he still read a paper, if indeed he had any idea that the hounds were baying at her heels.
‘Yes, I’ve come,’ she said. ‘Can we go in?’
‘Can you stay for tea?’ he asked as if he expected her to disappear again at any moment.
‘I was hoping to stay a bit longer than that,’ Beth replied, ‘if that’s all right.’
He nodded. ‘That would be nice. Your room’s all ready, just in case.’
Beth suppressed a feeling of irritation.
He went into the kitchen and she heard him filling the kettle. It still made precisely the same sound it had always made, the tinny drumming of the water into thin metal. He had always filled it through the spout with the tap on full. She heard him light the gas.
Nothing had changed inside the house. The parlour was a dark place with split leather armchairs and the old prints of clipper ships on the walls. She crossed over to the bookshelf to distract herself from her discomfort. There were all the bird books and the botanical guides, but there also, to her astonishment, was a spine she knew well, her own little book from last year, The Opportunity of Crisis. It was in her father’s political section sandwiched between Will Hutton’s The State We ‘re In and Christie Kilfillan’s Last Chance, as if keeping matter and anti-matter apart.
He came back in from the kitchen and caught her looking at them.
‘I thought I’d better read what you had to say,’ he said quietly and sat down. ‘Won’t be long. The kettle takes a minute or two.’
She almost said, I know that, kettles are the same everywhere, but she bit it back. ‘What did you make of it?’ she asked instead, caught between a reluctant pride in his interest and a flash of anticipatory irritation.
He thought. He had never minded waiting to get his words right and that had stretched out the hours of Beth’s childhood often to breaking point. ‘It’s a great achievement to write a book,’ he answered in the end. ‘You feel passionately about it. I admire passion.’
‘But you don’t agree with what it says.’
‘You wouldn’t expect me to, would you?’
‘I suppose not, but surely you can see…’
He held up a hand. ‘There are other things to talk about first,’ he said. ‘The world can wait until after we’ve had our tea.’
She stood there and watched him go back into the little kitchen. That had always been their relationship, him doing the job of both parents and her doing the job of one child. Until she’d left.
He came back with two mugs. Hers had a picture of an otter on it, which was no surprise.
‘You’re still not on the phone then,’ she said.
‘No need. The Turners take messages. Peggy bangs on the wall if it’s urgent.’
‘Is it often urgent?’
He looked at her as if trying to detect sarcasm. ‘We had an injured egret down in the marsh last week.’
Beth wasn’t entirely sure whether an egret was an animal or a bird. For the first time, a part of her found something valuable in the relentless simplicity of his life. Her mobile was switched off and nobody could reach her. Not one single person in the outside world had any idea where she was. No one outside Slapton even knew she had a father. Here she could be safe while she sorted everything out. London political gossip wouldn’t reach down here. Her own father didn’t even know exactly what she did, who she had been working for.
That was when, looking down into