Owlbury is a village in the Cotswolds, between the endemic shabbiness of Stroud and the despoiled elegance of Cheltenham. Those who like that kind of thing, and there are plenty who do, call it picturesque. The narrow, winding A46 climbs a hill, and becomes an even narrower High Street of gabled, stone houses, their plain facades given austere dignity by the precise fit of the yellow-grey ashlar and the skilful carving of lintels, dripstones, and mullions, their characteristic steeply pitched stone-tiled roofs enlivened as by an Impressionist with splashes of green, yellow, white and orange lichen.
In the centre of this touristic gem is, as might be expected, a parish church, large and imposing, for Owlbury once waxed fat trading the wool of the hugely fleeced sheep known as Cotswold lions that grazed the sloping pastures of the surrounding valleys. St Michael and All Angels has a tall tower, which bears at its summit a gilded weathercock, and on its western front a handsome clock face, below which two quaint figures in the gaudy costume of seventeenth-century men-at-arms strike the hours and the quarters on a bell that hangs between them. It is surrounded by an extensive churchyard, sprinkled with ancient, meticulously clipped yew-trees, in which the rude forefathers of the village, unlike the other inhabitants of the High Street, blessedly enjoy their sleep untroubled by the traffic that grinds its way along on the other side of the lychgate by which they were admitted.
Opposite the church stands The Tiger Inn. Its eighteenth-century exterior cloaks a foundation several centuries older. In front there is a cobbled yard, from where on certain days of the calendar the unspeakably posh Beaufort Hunt, in its unique dark blue livery, departs in full pursuit of the uneatable. The rest of the year, the impracticably uneven, heritage-listed surface – ladies in high heels beware! reads a helpful notice – is occupied by wooden benches and tables, which on sunny days are crowded with drinkers and diners.
At this relatively early hour, the pub had not yet opened its doors, and the Saturday influx of tourists had not yet arrived. The few inhabitants who were up and about, and who saw the passage of the white, battered, rust-streaked old-model Ford Fiesta as it roared and rattled along the High Street, might have noted that it was being driven at considerably more than the legal speed limit, but that was hardly unusual in these lawless days. Only those who combined curiosity with acute vision would have observed that the driver was a woman, and that her pale face was wet with tears.
Narrowly avoiding scraping a bumper on the stone gatepost as she made the awkward turning through the open five-barred gate, Catriona screeched the car to halt in a spray of shingle, then, reluctant to move, sat staring at the solid stone building that Flora and Bill had turned from a derelict shell used to store farm machinery into what most people would regard as a highly desirable residence.
Eventually, she roused herself, shouldering the car door, which eventually opened with its usual screeching. She swung her long legs over the sill and stood upright, gazing around her. The sun, blocked until now by the rise of the wooded hillside opposite, was just beginning to shed a few feeble shafts of light onto the stone tiles of the dormer-windowed roof, and the air was damp and cold. From the darkness of the trees to one side of the house came the plashing sound of the brook, which replenished the silver mirror of the millpond, in which fronds of green weed floated, like the long hair of a drowned maiden.
The spare key was in its usual place: under the plant pot on the right-hand side of the oak front door. As she touched the chilly phosphor-bronze, she felt a shudder like a mild electric shock: the metal might be the last point of contact with her sister’s living fingers.
Her feet clattered on the uncarpeted hardwood treads of the open-work staircase. On the beige cord carpeting of the landing, she hesitated, staring at the veneered door panel of what Bill had referred to, half-ironically, mimicking the jargon of the estate agents, as the master bedroom suite. Flora had riposted tartly, ‘Such a pity you have no mistress to share it with.’ Flora always had a nose for the pretentious, and was merciless in mocking it.
Had. Was. How easily she had slipped into the past tense.
She stood at the door listening, holding her own breath, hoping to hear thereby the softer murmur of a breath from within. But not the faintest whisper leaked from the gaps by the jambs. The silence coated the whole interior, as if it had been applied like paint. Finally, she exhaled, and the sound, which might have been a sigh, broke the spell. She pushed open the door, closing her eyes as tightly as she had as a small child, shutting out the imaginary horrors of the dark. But this was broad day, and the horrors were real.
She blinked in the sunshine which was now streaming unobstructed through the open curtains of the dormer window. The bed was in front of her, the bedclothes as brilliantly white as those in a detergent commercial.
At first she thought she had been dazzled, or that her brain had simply refused to acknowledge the message from her eyes. But as she drew nearer, and out of the direct line of the blinding rays, it was evident that she had not been deceived: no blonde head lay in a hollow of the bleached cotton fabric of the pillows. They were freshly plumped up, quite undented. The duvet lay flat and smooth, with no tell-tale hump to indicate a body lay beneath. She nevertheless snatched it aside. The tightly stretched sheet betrayed not a wrinkle of any recent occupancy. The bed was, undeniably, completely empty.
The house whose location Catriona rarely and reluctantly disclosed was, in fact, situated in a quiet street on the southern slope of Muswell Hill. She had bought it with a mortgage ten years before, when she had returned to England to take up her first job at Warbeck.
After years of student residences and communal living, she had been determined to have a place of her own. She was fed up of having to dodge damp underwear hanging from the shower-rails in shared bathrooms, and tired of rows over the responsibility for chores, damage, and the apportioning of household bills. Most of all, she was utterly sick of the constant presence of other personalities, other egos, and their intrusive interference with her own. God, how pleasant it was to come down in the morning into her own kitchen and not find in it some bleary-eyed fellow, a boyfriend, no doubt – how she hated that juvenile, mealy-mouthed word boyfriend! – slumped at the table over a mug of coffee, the stereo blaring the rock music she hated. How good it was to be able to read a book or a journal without being interrupted or distracted by a flatmate’s inane whining about being in love or not being in love. She was finished with all that.
From the start, she had loved her house, and for several years she had spent every spare moment doing it up. The weekend she had moved in, she had discovered in the hallway the original geometric and encaustic tile floor, quite intact under multiple layers of filthy linoleum. With a thorough cleaning and a lick of polish, the golds, azures, terracottas, blacks and reds had glowed as brightly as they must have done a century before. It had seemed, as she sat back on her heels to admire her handiwork, an omen. Underneath the tacky accretions of hardboard, chipboard, vinyl and laminate was the living form of the original Edwardian house. Its identity was occluded but not destroyed. It was her role to coax it once again into the light.
In the following weeks, she had exultantly hurled into a skip the cheap kitchen cupboards, the tacky DIY-store fitted wardrobes, the nylon shagpile carpets, and the other hideous sixties and seventies rubbish with which the place had been smothered. In the months and years afterwards, she had combed junk shops and reclamation yards in search of replacements for the features that had been destroyed. Every weekend had been spent in overalls and headscarf with almost manic effort: scrubbing, filling, sanding, painting, papering, tiling. She had reinstated fireplaces, matched and repaired plaster cornices, architraves and dado rails. She had hung doors. She had laid York stone paving in place of the cracked concrete that had covered the rear terrace. She had spent hours of frustration supervising slow-moving and sometimes recalcitrant workmen in those things