‘It’s quite something, eh? I’d have liked to put a telescope in there.’ Mick’s voice floated up from the foot of the stairs, with that same note of pride and affection that betrayed how much the house had been a labour of love for him. She had heard the pang in his voice as he had shown her around, pointing out examples of local craftsmanship or areas where the restoration had been particularly tricky. He envied her the chance to live in it, that much was plain. Perhaps it had been Kaye’s choice, not to move the children. But what child would not want to live here, with a beach and seals on their doorstep?
‘This view is amazing.’ She glanced around the empty room. The singing had sounded so definite, in the depths of the night, the woman’s pain so stark from behind the door. Strange, she thought, the tricks a fraught mind can play. She looked back out at the sea and, for the space of a heartbeat, she felt someone looking over her shoulder, a cold breath on her neck, so that she snapped around, thinking Mick had come up the stairs silently behind her. The room was empty. Downstairs, Mick gave a little cough, a hint that he wanted to get going.
He closed the door to the turret room behind her and immediately reopened it, turning the handle both ways to prove how easily it worked.
‘There. Definitely not locked.’
‘No. My mistake. Sorry.’ She had the sudden, absurd thought that someone must have been holding the handle from the other side, though she dismissed it straight away.
Mick dropped her in the main street of the village by the parade of shops she had seen the night before.
‘Half an hour do you? You’ve the wee supermarket across the way there and a chemist further down, and there’s – well, you’ll see. Have a wander. I’ll meet you back here.’
Zoe thanked him and was about to cross the street when he called her back, leaning out of the driver’s window.
‘Uh – Mrs Adams?’
‘Zoe,’ she said patiently.
‘I was wondering – had you any thoughts about what you would do for transport?’ He looked embarrassed, as if he should not have to be the one raising this subject.
‘Transport?’ She looked at him, not quite understanding the question.
‘It’s only – you’re a long way from civilisation out there. I mean, I’m happy to give you a lift now and then for the shopping, but there might be other times you run out of stuff or you just, you know, need to get out of there.’ He stopped, his face confused, as if he realised he had slipped up. ‘I mean, you might fancy a trip into town or, I don’t know. And, like I say, Kaye and I will do whatever we can to help, but if we’re not free …’
‘Oh, God, no – I wasn’t expecting you to drive me around the whole time.’ Zoe heard her voice come out unexpectedly shrill. Now she was embarrassed too; it was true that in her impulsive enthusiasm for the beautiful light over the sea she had not given much thought to the fact that she would need food and basic supplies in her splendid isolation. She supposed there had been a vague notion of cabs in the back of her mind. Now that she was here, she realised how foolish that had been. ‘I was thinking maybe I could rent a bike?’
‘It’s a thought,’ Mick said carefully, in a voice that implied it was a stupid one. ‘There’s a bike shop right at the end of the High Street, before you get to the school.’
A quicksilver flicker of interest in her belly at the mention of the school. She thought of the young teacher, his fringe falling in his eyes, his shy smile and his Andy Warhol glasses, and with the thought came that prickling awareness of her own body, alive and responsive, the way she had felt after the previous night’s dream. She had to look away from Mick in case he noticed the colour in her face.
‘But, listen – when the weather sets in, you won’t be wanting to cycle on those roads,’ he was saying, oblivious. He cleared his throat. ‘I only mention it because my pal Dougie Reid up at the golf course has a car he could rent you while you’re here. Very reasonable. Nothing fancy, but—’
‘That’s kind. Maybe …’ Her throat closed around the words. He was right; she had realised during the drive across grandly bleak sweeps of rust-coloured moorland that she would not manage here without her own car. It was six months since she had been behind a wheel. Each time she had tried, the panic rose up through her chest and engulfed her, so that she felt choked by it: the shakes and pounding heart, the numbness in her limbs, the sweat and the fast, shallow breathing. Perhaps here, in a different landscape, she might be able to face that down. There was a different anxiety in Mick’s expression, though, that she could not quite identify, one that had nothing to do with the worry that he would end up ferrying her around. He wants me to be able to escape, she thought, as if by sudden intuition. ‘You might need to get out of there,’ he had said, then tried to correct himself. Did even Mick – stoical, pragmatic Mick Drummond, scoffer at old wives’ tales – fear there was something she might need to flee at the house?
‘Great stuff – let’s find a time to go up there and take a look at it, at least.’ Mick seemed relieved. He glanced at his watch. ‘Half an hour, then. Shouldn’t take you more than that.’
He pulled away with a cheerful toot of his horn and Zoe crossed the street towards the grocery store. The food would be basic here, she suspected, none of the fancy stuff she liked from Whole Foods or the Thai grocer, but that was OK. She had little interest these days in cooking. There had been a time, when she and Dan had first moved in together and the idea of their first home was new and felt like a game, when she had liked to experiment with food. Dan was an enthusiastic cook; they had learned together. But lately, the business of making a family meal had come to feel like a thankless chore, an increasingly hollow pretence at normality, the time and effort expended so disproportionate to the end result, which was only ever bolted down so that everyone could return as quickly as possible to their separate rooms. Here she planned to live simply, to eat only things that required minimal effort. Cold meat, cheese, salad, bread, breakfast cereals. Coffee, maybe even cigarettes. The way she’d lived when she was at art school, and was so driven by her work that it was too important to interrupt for anything as trivial as eating. She wanted to recapture that kind of absorption, see if she was still capable of losing herself like that in the work. That’s why it was good there was no phone signal and no Wi-Fi at the house, she thought. No Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram. No distractions. Not that she had felt like sharing much in recent months anyway. She couldn’t bear to look at the news, and she only ever looked at her friends’ lives now with a twist of envy below her ribs and a feeling of exclusion, occasionally an unforgivable wish – there and gone in an instant – that some misfortune would slam into their apparently perfect lives. These thoughts quickly warped into self-loathing; she did not wish harm to her friends, how could she? And yet she could not help resenting them either, for their insularity, their self-satisfaction. For some time she had felt it might be easier to disengage entirely. In a flash of what had seemed at the time like boldness, she had deleted her Facebook and Instagram accounts before she left. She wanted to concentrate on being here, not clinging on remotely to the shreds of a life back home or worrying about how to curate her experience for other people’s approval. She was already starting to regret the decision.
A warm gust of air caught her as she walked past an open shop door, a scent of bread and vanilla, and she realised with a twinge that she had not eaten breakfast. In the window beside her, rustic loaves fanned out in baskets and pastries glistened wantonly on silver tiered cake-stands. A painted sign swung above the door, proclaiming Maggie’s Granary in curlicued script. A cinnamon bun from Maggie’s, Charles Joseph had said: the price of his stories. She hesitated on the threshold. If anyone in this place was likely to tell her the truth about the house, it would be the Professor.
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