Читать книгу The Perfect Sinner - Will Davenport - Страница 11

Having erased Slapton so successfully from her own story of herself, it had simply not occurred to Beth that Slapton’s inhabitants would not have done the same. If no one in London knew she came from Slapton, it seemed that everyone in Slapton knew she had gone to London and even had quite a good idea of what she was doing there. It didn’t occur to Beth that her father might be proud of her, that he might talk about her as if they were often in touch. Carrying in her head the scornful childish caricature of this place as somewhere so cut off from the modern world that it lacked television, radio and newspapers, she had been counting on anonymity. It had come as an absurd shock to find that her father knew exactly what had been happening to her in the past forty-eight hours, that the neighbours had told him, that people here were gossiping about her.

Head down, hurrying, Beth left his house and took refuge in the back lane. It led out of the side of the village towards her grandmother’s cottage, and it had served the younger Beth as an escape route many times before. There was nobody around in the lane, but she imagined eyes inside every window, looking at her, matching her to the stories in their morning papers, and it was a relief to leave the houses behind.

But Slapton wouldn’t leave her behind. It was coming back at her from the closed cupboards of memory, the stony surface of the path, the gate she used to sit on when she had somehow got annoyed with both parent and grandparent at once, and the fence where the dog had cornered her. In the first field, she saw the bushes where she used to make her camp and where, on her tenth birthday, she had buried a tin filled with the toys she decided she had outgrown, vowing to herself that she would never dig them up again.

The path led downhill between two more fields, then up into trees and by the stile she took the old branch to the right that led to Quarry Cottage. This was the spot, she had always felt, where you started to feel Eliza’s presence spreading out through the countryside around her house. She was going to take the familiar short cut straight through the deserted quarry, but something had changed. It was no longer deserted. New gates closed the gap between the trees. The roofs of the old sheds beyond had been repaired, the brambles had gone and a truck was parked on fresh gravel where the big puddle always used to be.

Eliza’s path ran around the far side of the quarry between the trees and Beth intended to take it but, out of mild curiosity and more from an unexpressed wish to delay her arrival at the old woman’s house, she walked towards the new gate, opened it an inch or two and looked in, straight up into the face of the man who had been walking quietly towards it from the other side. He wore overalls and he was pulling off a pair of heavy leather gloves. His face was painted with matt grey dust which accentuated the sharp planes of his cheeks. He was smiling at some private joke and his eyes shone. What was even more surprising was that he stopped, looked at her calmly and said ‘Hello Beth, I heard you were back,’ and for a moment, she had no idea who he was.

‘Lewis?’ she said, after a giveaway pause. ‘Is it you?’ For just one absurd moment, she had taken him for Lewis’s older brother, but Lewis didn’t have an older brother. Seven years had filled him out and toughened him. She knew it was seven years because the last time she had seen him, they were each home from university and she had given him the cold shoulder. Then they’d both moved away.

‘You went off somewhere,’ she said. ‘Scotland?’

‘Ireland. I came back. What about you?’

‘I…seem to be back too. Just for a day or two.’ She looked in through the gate. ‘What’s going on here?’

‘Hasn’t Eliza told you? I reopened the old place.’

‘As a quarry? I thought it died on its feet years ago.’

‘Come in and see,’ he suggested, ‘if you’re not in too much of a rush.’

‘I ought to go on.’

‘It’ll only take a minute. I can’t be too long myself. I’ve got to be in Dartmouth in half an hour. It would be handy because I’ve got a bag of Eliza’s shopping in the shed. You could save me time by taking it with you. That’s if you don’t mind?’

Seven years on, and they were talking about Eliza’s shopping. She didn’t know whether to be annoyed or relieved.

Inside, the tall face of the quarry loomed out of the trees to their left. Rows of rough-cut stone slabs were laid out on the ground. He took her to the larger of the two sheds.

‘You remember, this whole place was my granddad’s?’ he said as he unlocked the door. ‘He never worked the stone, not after the war anyway. When he died he left it to me, so I decided I’d have a go.’

‘By yourself?’

‘Me and Rob. He’s here part-time.’

‘Who’s Rob?’

‘You must remember Rob. Robin Watson? He was in primary with us. He went to the comprehensive.’

For a moment Beth rejected the very idea that she might remember someone from junior school, that even more connections might be waiting in this place, ready to trap her and wind her back in, but all the same she had a vague memory of a large, shambling boy. The comprehensive? She and Lewis had both gone on to the grammar school, the only ones from Slap ton who did. Seven years of that long bus ride together, twice every day.

‘You make a living out of this?’ she asked, looking around.

‘You mean is it just a hobby? No, it’s a job.’

She bit back her words. She wanted to say, you were bright, you could have done anything. Why are you wearing dirty overalls with stone dust in your hair? Why are you wasting time in Slapton? You got away, why did you come back?

His eyes changed as if he remembered her capacity for scorn. ‘It’s a little gem, this place.’ He checked his watch, ‘Do you know anything about geology?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘Have you ever been to Purbeck?’

‘No.’

‘On the Dorset coast? Maybe, oh I don’t know, sixty miles east of here. The Isle of Purbeck? It’s not really an island. They just call it that. It’s this side of Weymouth.’

‘I haven’t been there, no.’ He talked as if he could persuade her she had.

‘Well, it was always famous for Purbeck marble. There’s not much left to be had now. Come in and have a quick look, I’ll show you.’

On a bench inside was a carved and fluted column in a stone so dark green it was almost black. It glistened.

‘It’s not really marble,’ he said, running one hand over it. ‘That’s just what they call it. It’s a sandstone, you see, but it’s packed full of tiny, hard shells and when you cut it clean you can get a real shine on it. Beautiful, isn’t it? They always used it for the fine work in churches and places like that.’ His voice had an unexpected reverence in it.

Despite herself, the stone drew her attention and she traced the path of his fingers with her own. ‘So you get it from Purbeck and you carve it here?’

‘Oh no, no. This came from here. That’s the whole point. This is a geological oddity, you see, our very own little outcrop of the marble on the south-west, north-east line. The only place you find it west of Purbeck itself.’

‘So people still want it?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘What’s this bit for?’

‘Restoration work for a church in Winchester.’

‘And they come all the way here for it?’

‘Beth, this is where they came originally when they were building that same church. The marble looks just a little bit different in every seam, you see, the colour, the shade. You want to match it, you got to come back to the same place.’ He had always had enthusiasm and she could remember how much that had annoyed her when enthusiasm in any form was the last thing she admired. He bent down and pulled out a section of a column from the floor below the bench. It was dull and half of it had crumbled away. ‘This is the bit they want to replace. I’ve been down into a few of the old holes and I reckon I’ve found the very same face it came from in the first place. I’m carving the exact same stone.’

‘Why’s it in such a state?’ Beth asked, looking at the crumbling piece on the floor between them.

Lewis frowned. ‘It was just poor stuff. There was a pocket of mud in it and they carved it badly anyway. They should never have let it leave the quarry.’ He sounded irritated, almost angry, as if the family had let someone down.

‘When was that?’ Beth asked, thinking perhaps it was back in the fifties or sixties when his grandfather was still working.

‘Thirteen twenty-two,’ said Lewis. ‘They’ve still got all the old records. Very bad. You shouldn’t let anyone down like that. This stone should be good for thousands of years.’

She looked hard at him and saw he meant what he said. He was annoyed with stone cutters who had been dead more than seven centuries for letting the business down.

‘Any chance you can come back tomorrow?’ he said, looking at his watch again, ‘I’d like to show you the rest. See what you think.’

‘Maybe,’ said Beth. ‘I’m not sure how long I’m staying.’

‘Do you mind giving this to Eliza?’ he asked, picking up a shopping bag. ‘Her change is in it.’

‘If she’s there. I was going to take potluck. She doesn’t even know I’m here yet.’

‘Oh yes she does,’ said Lewis. ‘That’s how I knew you were here. She told me.’

Eliza already knew she was here. How could that be? All at once Beth found she needed to be out in the fresh air again, away from people who knew things. There was no escaping her grandmother though. Not if she knew.

‘Do you see much of her?’

‘She drops in most days for a chat and a cup of tea.’

She was heading for the door when she first noticed the fragments of the old stone slab. They were laid out on a flat table, eroded and camouflaged with lichen. She paused for a moment to look and Lewis stopped too. It had once been a stone rectangle, but at some point, long ago, it had broken apart into a dozen constituent pieces and the jagged edges had been softened and blurred with all the time that had passed since. Someone, Lewis presumably, had laid it out carefully on the wooden table, fitting it together like a jigsaw, but there was a large gap where one piece was missing. Faint lettering was incised into it, but that too had eroded almost away.

‘What’s this?’ she asked.

‘I’m doing some restoration,’ Lewis said. ‘It came from the Chantry tower. They want me to put it back together if I can.’

‘Who’s they? English Heritage?’

‘No. The tower’s privately owned. The house and the tower. Don’t you remember? I think it’s changed hands since your time.’

She did remember, vaguely. The great tower had never been an important part of her life in Slapton, having no function.

‘What is this? A memorial of some sort?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Do you know what it says?’

‘Only part of it. You’ve heard of Guy de Bryan?’

‘No.’

He looked surprised for a moment then glanced at his watch yet again. ‘I really should get going. Come back when you’ve got a bit of time. I’ll tell you all about it.’

So then he was gone and she was alone again, outside the quarry, watching him drive away and pushing down the memories which seemed too childish to be allowed. She turned back to the path to Eliza’s, knowing there was no alternative but to walk on down it and knowing that at the far end was the wonderful, dreadful woman who was her grandmother and who loved her and disapproved of her in equal measure.

She sighed and started walking. It had never before struck her as odd that when the path bent around to the left and delivered her, still unprepared, to the house, it was the rear of the house that she saw and not the front. The house sat in a clearing in the trees facing the wrong way, as if it had one day heaved itself up in a sulk and turned its back on its visitors. The garden was here, on this side. The front faced nothing but the dense and ragged trees which Eliza had left untended for years so that they pressed against the front windows, scraping the glass when the wind blew and shading the sitting room. Eliza never bothered to open the curtains. She lived in the kitchen most of the time, except when she was out in her sheds doing obscure jobs with the wrong tools.

Eliza was standing there outside the back door as if she had been expecting her.

‘Have you come by yourself?’ was the first thing she said, taking the shopping bag and peering past Beth at the trees as though she might have to repel an invading horde.

‘Yes,’ said Beth ‘Hello Gran.’

‘You’d better come in before anyone sees you.’

That made Beth look around too, but all was quiet in the clearing in the trees and there was no one there but the two of them.

Eliza’s kitchen was the same as ever. In the middle stood an old oak table and around it were a sofa and three armchairs which, even before they had sagged with half a century of use, had been much too low for the table. Since Beth had first known this room, which was as far back as she could remember, she had always had to lean forward from the swaying nest of springs and horsehair to reach up to the table for her plate or cup. Meals at Quarry Cottage were eaten on your lap, and if Eliza was sitting opposite, you wound up talking to the top of her head because that was all you could see.

‘I’ve got elderflower or mead,’ said Eliza. ‘The mead’s sweeter but the elderflower’s older.’

‘Could I just have a glass of water?’ Beth nearly said mineral water before she remembered where she was.

‘From the tap?’ Eliza sounded shocked. ‘I’d have to boil it.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s coming out a bit green. The pump’s been greased.’

‘A cup of tea then?’

Eliza went into the larder and came out with two tumblers of a thick amber liquid. Beth recognised the sweet honey smell of her mead and resigned herself. Her grandmother put one on the table and drained most of the other one at a gulp. She was the same as ever, as thin as a kipper, as she always said, and much the same colour. Eliza’s skin was as tough as tanned leather. She looked as if she’d been smoked. Scorning hairdressers after a woman in Dartmouth had once tried to charge her a pound for a cut and wash in the nineteen seventies, she had bought a pair of electric clippers and kept her white hair shorn in a bristly crew cut. She was not much more than five feet two inches tall, but she was not in the slightest bit fragile.

She stood looking down at Beth, who was trying to find a section of the sofa where the ends of the springs weren’t so sharp.

‘You’ve got yourself in a pickle, girl,’ she observed. ‘I never thought going off to London was a good idea. Don’t know what’s wrong with Slapton.’

Eliza didn’t read the papers. She said bad news would come and find you soon enough if it mattered. There wasn’t a radio in the house and Beth was pretty sure her grandmother had never watched television in her entire life.

‘I asked Lewis,’ the old woman said, divining Beth’s puzzlement. ‘They were talking in the churchyard yesterday. I heard your name before they saw me.’

So Lewis knew all about it too.

‘You got thinner,’ Eliza observed, inspecting her.

Thank you.’

‘Don’t thank me. That’s not a compliment. You look like a refugee. Have you been doing what I said? A mug of hot milk every night, with local honey in it? Got to be local. The bees give you what you need, see? The pollen from the flowers around about where you live, that’s the best thing for you.’

There’re not many bees in central London, Gran.’

Eliza snorted. ‘Course there are. There’s bees everywhere. You’re just too busy to notice as well as too busy to eat properly. Well, I suppose I thought you’d be more different.’

‘I haven’t been away that long.’

‘Oh yes you have. Two letters and one postcard in getting on for three years? I suppose I should be counting myself lucky. It’s more than your dad’s had.’