Hidden Gems

Hidden Gems chapters 1 to 8

2009-08-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

You have to take the slow train to Hestyn. You have to stop at seven places along a 40-mile (64km) branch line. Seven empty platforms, half-swallowed by goosegrass and bindweed. Seven times the creak of carriages, the squeak of wheels, and birdsong. Then it’s a brief dash for the terminus, plunging into a tunnel and emerging on the very edge of the country, skimming the coast. Crooked houses line the former harbour, now silted up two miles (3.2km) from the sea. Tucked behind them, in the shelter of the high cliff known as Great Hood, is the town itself, a tangle of streets untouched by time. All around, sweeping down to the shore, overhanging roofs and chimneys, hiding Hestyn from the world’s view, is a mass of greenery, some as old as the land itself—though the bushes that rampage over Great Hood are rhododendrons, planted for the Manor House at the turn of the 20th century, and left to run riot after its desertion.

‘How’s that for starters?’

‘Lovely. Very poetic. Bung it in the laptop, there’s a good lad. Have you got a title yet? I’m thinking Gems of the Coast. What do you reckon? Wilf? Wilf? What are you doing? You sound like a bloodhound’.

Wilf scrambles down a narrow track gouged from grass and rock. His foot thuds against a large stone. He lands heavily on one thigh, falls back onto something sharp in his backpack and releases a loud obscenity that floats out from the clifftop and over the town.

‘Jesus—Wilf? You all right?’

Wilf secures his footing on the muddy track. One hand flaps to keep him upright; the other presses his mobile to his ear.

‘OK—I’m OK. Just grappling with the terrain’.

He pauses to search for a feasible route down from the cliff. Here and there, through loops and eyes of impossible rhododendron tendrils, a horizontal sheen is the only suggestion of a sea view.

‘I’m having to cut the town walk short. I think I might be lost. And I haven’t even found a place to stay yet’ he grumbles.

‘That’s what I like about you, Wilf—so passionate about your work’. Paul’s voice and interest are fading.

‘This is a shitty place’ says Wilf.

‘Change of scene’ says Paul ‘will do you the world of good. Recharge the batteries. Clear the mind.’

‘This is the arse-end of nowhere’ says Wilf. ‘I don’t know how you talked me into it.’

By the time Wilf makes it back to Hestyn the air is thickening into a damp dusk. It’s almost dark in the bushy lane from Great Hood to the edge of town. Wilf lengthens his stride, beginning to fret about finding a room. When he emerges into the top end of Hood Street he’s surprised to find it still light. Bricks and tiles have begun to take on a violet glow, and here and there he can see the pale gold of streetlights and living-room windows. He’ll never find anywhere in this dump. He should never have left his house. Once upon a time, long, long ago, when it was a proper house in a road of others exactly like it, when there were paving stones and shrubs and people watered their hanging baskets and put the bins out and walked their dogs, Wilf was constantly waiting for the next excuse to leave. Forever marking up his maps with coloured dots, planning a new campaign, booking tickets on the internet, checking timetables, folding handy raincapes and tucking socks into the corners of his backpack. In those days, going home was an anticlimax. Opening the front door to musty, unused air and the tick of a clock, gathering up bills and freesheets from the hall floor, switching on a radio to confuse the space … It was captivity. Now, as the light sinks and Wilf struggles to orientate himself in the evening chill, he longs for his skewiff bookshelves and his blasted street. He’s already calculating how quickly he can get through the places on his itinerary and scurry back home.

There’s noone around in the outlying streets. A buzz of TVs and the occasional child’s yell from behind closed doors are the only evidence of human life. But as he nears the centre he begins to pass others: a stout woman lumbering home, balanced by heavy shopping bags; a young girl jogging with miniscule, violent steps that make her pony-tail and breasts bounce in time; a leather-faced old man, fag angled in his mouth, being hoiked along in the wake of his gasping dog. Wilf guesses at a short cut through a side street and passes a pub with grime-tinted windows and a blare of big-screen sport; a boarded-up church; a junk shop crammed with broken dolls, old typewriters and computer keyboards, mouldering Christmas decorations, a framed appliqué picture of Ben Nevis, a handwritten sign saying ‘Loo rolls three for one special offer’. Wilf strides on, guided by metallic noises and shouts, and eventually comes out into the marketplace, where the stalls are being dismantled and the last few shoppers and first few teens are kicking through polystyrene takeaway boxes, crumpled drink cans and cabbage leaves.

Edward III granted Hestyn market privileges in 1332, and ever since then the square at the heart of town has been a focus of trade for the farms and coastal hamlets of the area. The surrounding buildings are a mish-mash of styles that provide a compact lesson in Hestyn’s history. A bakery and tea-room now occupy the rickety 15th-century half-timbered merchant’s house on one corner. The faded elegance of the Royal Hotel testifies to a flurry of interest in Hestyn’s bracing sea air during the Regency; and the gargoyles and pinnacles of the neoGothic town hall, facing the hotel across the square, marks another brief period of prosperity which followed the arrival of the railway. The most recent addition is a glass-and-concrete government office block, erected on the northwestern corner after its medieval predecessor fell into ruin.

Job centre, actually, notes Wilf, pausing outside—but that doesn’t sound very lyrical. He fishes the A4 Town Walk sheet from his back pocket and unfolds it to consult the crooked text next to a line-drawing of the square. Apparently, the long-gone medieval house was the earliest in town. ‘Nevertheless’ remarks the author—with some rancour, thinks Wilf—‘its demolition was welcomed by a majority of townspeople, who were more concerned with its delapidated appearance than with its historical value’. Wilf appreciates these local historians, who do so much of his groundwork and ask for nothing in return. He went straight to the town library when he arrived. Sure enough, Lambert’s Town Walk (free) and a thin booklet on the Wildlife of the Coast (60p)—probably all the literature available on Hestyn—were waiting for him in neat piles at the returns desk. Next to maps, libraries are Wilf’s favourite thing. He turns the page and reads the brief description of Hestyn House, or The Big House, supposedly found ‘along the clifftop trail’. What sort of direction is that? There’s an asterisk and, squeezed onto the end of the paper, a footnote: ‘For tours of the house contact Tourist Information’. Wilf scans the square. No tourist office or any other place that might conceivably arrange tours. Or display accommodation lists, come to that. A small knot of youths has formed under one of the streetlamps and beer and cigarettes are being passed round. All the stalls are down now, and two men are rolling steel poles onto the back of a truck. One of them regards Wilf warily, then gives an unsmiling nod when he catches his eye. Wilf takes his cue and wanders over.

‘Excuse me—do you know if there are any guesthouses round here?’

The men exchange a weighted look.

‘Long time since anyone’s asked that’ mutters one.

‘Passing through, are you?’ asks the other, with a hint of mockery.

‘As a matter of fact’ says Wilf, brightly, ‘I’m writing a travel guide’.

‘Oh, aye—to Hestyn?’ A phlegmy crack of laughter, and then their faces change as they realise he means it.

‘A travel guide to this dump?’ says the first man; the second, his throat still rumbling, starts locking the back of the truck. ‘Nowhere else left to go, is that it?’

‘That’s about it, yes’.

First Man nods, acknowledging the world’s insanity. Then inspiration strikes.

‘Tell you what, you could try Gwennie Price. She used to take in guests, didn’t she?’.

‘When she could find ‘em,’ comments Second Man, heading for the driver’s door.

Wilf stands outside a terraced house and wonders whether he misheard First Man’s directions. The curtains are open and the lights are on, and he can see the top of someone’s head over the back of an armchair, and the flashing glow of a TV screen. A hand-painted sign over the front door says ‘Rosehill’. This is definitely the one—First Man said it had a poncey name. Wilf opens the gate and notices a startled movement from the chair as he approaches the door.

‘Guests?’

Gwennie Price holds the door firmly at her own body width. Her expression shifts between suspicion and delight. She’s wearing some kind of quilted housecoat spattered with pink flowers, and her grey hair lies long on her forehead and around her jowls, giving her whole face a downward slant.

‘Just for two or three nights. I’ll pay the going rate’ says Wilf. The word ‘rate’ seems to flick a switch. Gwennie Price clutches at the front of her housecoat, trying to make it more decent, and steps back, opening the door wide.

‘Give me a sec, love, and I’ll straighten out the room at the back. There’s tea in the pot—I’ll fetch you a cup and you put up your feet by the telly while I get it all … aired… Won’t take a tick…’

She ushers him into the front room. Wilf hesitates at her armchair and opts for the tiny sofa instead. Some grinning ninny on the box is doling out tips about decorating bathrooms. The chink of a teapot from the kitchen. Wilf puts his finger into his left ear and waggles it experimentally. There’s a low-buzz in there; it’s been there since the explosion. During the day he barely notices it, but in silence it’s a constant, flickering presence. At home, he opens the window at night to cover it with the drone of the motorway. In a place like this, where there’s only silence after dark … Wilf focuses on the TV expert’s advice about grout-cleaning. One thing at a time. At least he’s got somewhere to stay.

It takes him a full minute, next morning, to remember where he is. He gazes at the thin curtains and lavender wallpaper and waits while they assemble themselves into context. Yes—Rosehill. He’s in the box room—the only one, Gwennie explained apologetically, warm enough in this chilly weather. Through the half-open door of another bedroom he’d spotted the real reason—boxes, bags, clothes and knick-knacks stored in every available space. Must be several years since Gwennie Price had paying guests. But the box room was fine for Wilf. Gwennie must have a generator of some kind; she’s slipped through the power restrictions, and keeps the heating on all night. The hum of a radiator pipe, which would have driven some to distraction, offered Wilf relief from the insect in his ear. And he doesn’t mind the lack of space. He doesn’t need much room for his kitbag.

A frizzle of bacon wafts up the stairs. Gwennie Price believes in feeding up. She cooked him sausage, beans and chips last night and then retreated to the kitchen, leaving him, despite his protests, to eat in front of her telly. Wilf throws on a T-shirt and shorts and pads out to the toilet. He doesn’t like using other people’s lavatories. He has a temperamental gut and likes to take his time. Especially if there’s another big meal to tackle. Sitting in the loo, drilling his finger into his damaged ear, Wilf heaves a deep sigh. I bet Paul doesn’t have a dodgy gut, he thinks, bitterly. I bet Paul’s got perfect hearing. Paul has always seemed to Wilf a perfect example of Life Going Right. In comparison, Wilf never feels he can quite measure up.

Breakfast is served in the ‘Morning Room’—a back room with a piano and double doors leading into a garden swamped by the relentless, dripping rhododendron bushes. There are two small tables, one laid for Wilf. His tablemat has a sepia line-drawing of Caerphilly Castle. A carriage clock’s fragile ticking divides the silence. Gwennie appears, transformed, her hair hauled and stapled into place on top of her head, foundation and lipstick glistening, blouse and skirt pressed and curveless. She stands over him while he tackles bacon, egg and tomatoes.

‘Busy day ahead?’

Wilf swallows his mouthful quickly.

‘Actually, I wondered …’ He draws the crumpled Town Walk from his back pocket. ‘Do you know how I get to Hestyn House?’

‘Ah…’ Gwennie produces a tiny pair of half-moon glasses, apparently from nowhere. She peers at the sheet of paper. ‘The gentleman you want is Lambert Stokes. He wrote that, you know! Mr Stokes knows all there is to know about this place. Now.’ The glasses vanish again. ‘Tell me. Which countries have you written about, Mr Bromley? What a wonderful job you’ve got!’

By the time Wilf’s plate is cleared she knows the title of every guide he’s ever written. Her more intimate questions fall on stony ground. But when her ‘Wife? Children?” meet with a simple ‘No’ she has the sense to leave it at that.

Wilf didn’t want to take this assignment. But Paul has always had a way of talking him into things, ever since they were at school together. When he set up his publishing business he roped Wilf in as easily as he used to coax him into playing in goal or going on a double date. Same with this job—even though Wilf had shut himself up like a hermit since Aggie had gone. Didn’t pick up the phone, didn’t look at his e-mails: just stayed in his house, looking at his maps. Wilf has always liked maps. That was why Paul reckoned he’d be good at this job—according to Paul, anyway. And it’s true that Wilf can spend hours poring over the things. Spreads them out on the floor, anchors the corners (ashtray, book, left shoe, right shoe), and goes down on all fours to explore. He likes their truth, and their falsehood, the way they reduce and calm all the crap of daily life into grids and measures and scales. He likes the painstaken details, the diminishing rings of high ground, the streets divided into individual houses, each one separated from its neighbour with a hairline wall. He likes the shapes and symbols: a group of perfect circles (oil refinery); a swarm of arrowheads (heathland). He appreciates the absence of mess, of noise, of birdshit and squashed foxes and discarded burger-boxes and smells. New editions are a particular treat—comparing and contrasting, noting the tiny additions and deletions signifying calamitous upheaval. Next time, his own street will have been replaced—with what? A jagged star, maybe, or just a blank space. Except for one solitary square representing Wilf’s home.

When Paul rang about this commission, Wilf barely registered the sound of the phone. His own voice spoke.

‘Sorry I can’t get there right now’—and Wilf continued tracing contours with his finger.

‘Stop screening’ Paul barked through the recording. ‘Answer the phone. I know you’re there’.

Wilf followed a bridleway through green pencil-flicked woods.

‘Stop moping, man. Pick up, you miserable bastard. I’ve got a job for you. Come on. Speak to me. I know you’re there’.

Of course he knew Wilf was there. Everyone knew where Wilf was—in the only remaining house of his row, standing proud and foolish like the last tooth. Next door kept it company for a few weeks after the incident, but in the end it had to be knocked down. And no doubt Wilf’s will go, sooner or later. There are two long cracks in the end wall—once the party wall—travelling to opposite corners. Crossing him out. It doesn’t look good. On the other hand, so far it’s stood firm against all the odds. After the explosion all Wilf’s maps and books and knick-knacks, CDs, photographs, interesting bits of driftwood, broken mirrors, were shaken onto the floor of every room. He had to wade knee-deep through a crackling marsh of his own belongings. And then the house staggered, sighed and found its level, and it hasn’t budged since. Aggie used to call it a ‘reliable little house’—and she was right. He can, at least, rely on his house. It’s all back in order now, all swept and stacked and shoved into place, though the shelves are crooked and everything leans at an angle. It’s like being at sea, especially on dark nights, when the walls are buffeted by the space that other houses used to fill.

‘I know you’re there’ said Paul’s voice for the last time. ‘If you won’t pick up, do me a favour and come to the office. I’ll be in all day tomorrow’.

He could have let it go. But even in the quiet depth of his self-pity, Wilf was aware of the mortgage bill and the overdue credit card and the grim-looking Inland Revenue envelope. He needed to earn some money. After the click of the answerphone he leaned back on his heels, creasing the edge of his map, and decided it was time to get on with life.

The next day Wilf cycled to Sitwell Publications. He locked his bike to the parking restriction sign and took the outer stairs up the side of the building, avoiding the kilted Big Issue salesman at the main entrance. He paused on the small landing to smoke half a cigarette, then stubbed the rest underfoot, adding to the squelchy accumulation of fag-ends on the metal platform. He keyed his PIN into the security pad and from above his head a small camera angled itself for a better view with a smooth buzz. As the door gave way Wilf breathed in the canned office air, and was seized by a kind of stage fright. The familiar quickening of the pulse that always used to herald an encounter with Aggie now combined with a swell of nausea. He was tempted to turn round and go back to his maps. Instead he padded along the pale-carpeted walkway towards Paul’s room. Everything was the same. Employees hurried between desks and paper-coloured computers. Phones rang with digital restraint. A percolator tutted. A photocopier dealt out pages in soft, rhythmic wingbeats. Nothing had changed at all. Wilf rapped on Paul’s door and immediately opened it. Paul looked up from his screen and said

‘Good lad! Just the man I wanted to see.’

‘Guidebooks?’ Wilf said. ‘New guidebooks?’

‘Of course.’ Paul spread his hands like a magician. ‘That’s what we do.’

‘What we used to do.’ Wilf swivelled his chair rapidly from side to side, trying to erase the scenes that fell into his mind.

‘What we’re still doing, mate.’ Paul attended to something on his screen as he spoke. ‘I don’t want to be harsh, but—the whole world didn’t screech to a halt, you know, when you lost Aggie’.

‘No, I don’t mean—’

A young woman with scythed blonde hair came in, laid an armful of pageproofs on the corner of Paul’s desk, and left.

‘Great’ said Paul as the door clunked behind her. ‘So much for the paperless office’.

‘New guidebooks?’ repeated Wilf. ‘You don’t think it’ll look … bizarre? In the current climate!’

The phrase ignited a gleam of mockery in Paul’s eyes. Wilf hurried on.

‘Paul, who’s going to buy them? These days? Where is there to go? Nowhere that’s safe.’

‘Don’t exaggerate, Wilf. You’ve been watching too much rolling news, that’s your trouble’.

In fact Wilf had watched anything but the news. Talent shows, soaps, ‘reality’ TV, the further from real life the better. He couldn’t bear to see the footage of far-off calamity—torn apartment blocks, chewed bodies, charred cars. He said,

‘The world’s busy blowing itself up. That’s no exaggeration. I wouldn’t have thought there was much of a market for travel guides. And presumably you’ve still got to sell the things, haven’t you?’

‘Afraid so, old son. Government grant hardly covers the cost of your coffee’.

‘There you are, then. So they must be a non-starter, the way things are now’.

Paul slapped the top sheet of the pageproofs.

‘That’s where you’re wrong, my friend. Tourists—gawd bless ‘em—they’re like blackfly. Descend on any spare patch of green. Any scene of any event. Battlefields, concentration camps, bombsites …they can’t help themselves. It’s in the genes. Blood still fresh on the ground, survivors brushing themselves down, diggers shovelling away the leftovers—next thing you know, someone wanders in with a bumbag and a camcorder looking for postcards. And someone else is propping up a stall selling coffee and souvenir pieces of bombed-out van. That’s life, Wilf. That’s progress.’

‘Aggie always said you were a cynic.’.

The words had sputtered out, in bitter little shards, before he could stop them. Paul narrowed his eyes, deciding how to play it.

‘Aggie’ he said in the end ‘was a fine one to talk’

‘Oh, come on’ protested Wilf, suddenly defensive. ‘Say what you like, you could never call Aggie a cynic.’

Paul bounced gently on his deskchair, tugging his shirt straight, and dismissed the subject:

‘Anyway. I’m not sending you out into the war zone. Not making that mistake again. You don’t have to leave this emerald isle at all, in fact. As it happens … we are cutting back somewhat on foreign destinations …’ Wilf gave a yelp of triumph. ‘… Just a slight change of focus, that’s all. Comfort. Heritage. Wilderness with a parking place. You’re going to venture to the last few secret corners of the country, and tell us everything there is to know. You’re off on a coastal odyssey, old mate. Get your notebook out and let’s talk schedules.’

Wilf has always approached adult life as a test. He used to have a mental ticklist—not so much a list of achievements, more a way of checking he was normal.

Got through school with decent enough qualifications. Tick.

Passed his driving test (third time). Tick.

Got drunk enough to throw up outside his halls of residence. Tick.

Had sex (finally). Not a thrilling experience or one that he or Beryl Harris cared to repeat—but both had needed to cross that particular item off the list, and each would occupy a secret place of gratitude in the other’s heart, all their separate lives.

He’d ticked off degree, job, flat and at 23 was ready for love and marriage. He was still waiting for that to happen when Paul oozed back into his life. They’d lost touch for a while, after school. Paul said he’d been doing ‘this and that’; judging from his designer suit, whatever it was had been pretty lucrative. Now he was striking out, as he put it, grasping the nettle. ‘Time for a little adventure, my old china. A new voyage of discovery. And I want you on board, mate’

‘You’re kidding,’ bleated Wilf. ‘I haven’t got an adventurous bone in my body’.

‘Nonsense. I bet you’ve done all sorts of things since we saw each other last’.

Wilf ran through the risks he’d taken so far, mainly in the hope of attracting a woman. He’d joined a book club. Attended an Italian evening class. Auditioned for a drama society (but failed). He’d grown a moustache, then shaved it off again. ‘Wise move’, commented Paul, eyeing his chin.

Wilf shrugged. ‘That’s as risky as it gets, in my life’.

‘Well, your life’ said Paul, reaching round the pub table to thump him on the shoulder, ‘is about to take a turn for the better. You’re going to write travel guides…’

‘Guides?’ Wilf’s lager missed his mouth and dribbled down his chin. ‘Write guides?’ he squeaked, mopping himself up with a dirty hanky.

‘Why not? You write reports, don’t you? You like maps…’

‘But that’s hardly—’

‘You’re going to jack in your desk job and be a freelance travel writer’.

‘A freelance—but Paul, you know what I’m like with organising, and money and things. Who the hell would employ me?’

‘No need to worry on that score. You’ll work for me. I’m starting a publishing company, and you’re going to be my main writing man’.

‘Paul, you’re talking complete and utter—’

‘—and I want to hook you up with a very interesting little ball of fire called Aggie…’

‘Aggie?’

Paul sat back, letting his expensive jacket swing open to reveal an equally expensive shirt.

‘She’ll be your editor. You two will be the dream team’.

Wilf took a wary sip at his drink.

‘This is all cobblers, Paul’ he said. ‘It’s never going to happen’.

Sitwell Publications started off on two ramshackle upper floors above an estate agency in a Georgian townhouse. The whole place crackled and groaned and squeaked and shook to the slightest human movement. The floors heaved and dipped like an ocean, straining under the weight of desks and copiers. Paul allocated himself an office and talked at his half-dozen staff about target readerships and marketing profiles and brands. He drew freehand diagrams on a flipchart. He slashed a circle in three with violent horizontal lines, to demonstrate his three-way mission: glossy, highbrow titles for the Visitor with money to spend; at-a-glance guides to sights, hotels and restaurants for the Tourist with budgets to control; cutting-edge, tell-it-like-it-is, shoot-from-the-hip ‘docubooks’ for the hard-core, deep-thinking Traveller. Wilf started an internet course on travel writing, but Paul told him not to bother.

‘Learn on the job, mate. Learn on the job. Aggie starts here next week. I’ll fix up a meeting and we’re off to go’.

Wilf caught sight of her before she turned to look at him. Paul had ushered him into the office and she was sitting with her back to them—frizzy hair, patched jeans, a man’s jacket. Then Wilf stepped on that creaky floorboard, and tried to make a joke of it.

‘Oops!’ he said. ‘Pardon me!’

Aggie looked round, baffled. She hadn’t even noticed the rasp of wood under his foot—why would she, among all the other noises in this place? And now he’d drawn her attention to it, and she probably thought he had broken wind, and was trying to cover it up. Paul introduced them. Wilf had cycled in and was windblown and sweaty; he wiped his palm on his anorak before shaking her cool, dry hand. Paul shut the door and the whole room shivered. Outside, one of the newly introduced printers started up like a machine-gun and set the windows chattering in their frames.

‘Won’t have to put up with this much longer’ remarked Paul, steadying a mug on his desk. ‘Pastures new before long’.

‘Really?’ asked Aggie. She had a low, husky voice. Wilf liked it.

‘Yup. Got a grant for it. We’re moving to state-of-the-art premises at the edge of town.

‘How did you manage that?’ asked Wilf, though he wasn’t surprised. Paul managed everything, somehow.

‘Oh, you know—new enterprise, green shoots; you talk the talk and they’re falling over themselves to help you walk the walk.’

Aggie exchanged a look with Wilf. She said,

‘Sounds like some kind of a scam to me—dont’t you reckon, Wilf?’

Wilf gave an idiotic laugh, drowned out by a sudden violent rumbling of his stomach. Paul said,

‘Time for elevenses, I guess’, and went to fetch coffee and biscuits.

‘No breakfast’ gasped Wilf, battling to suppress a blush.

Aggie said,

‘So, Wilf, these new guides …’

He sat forward, nodding intelligently. Aggie said she didn’t want the usual rehashed tat. She said, ‘Frankly, Wilf, most of these guides are anodyne pap, lies and half-lies, tourist office spin’.

Wilf said he couldn’t agree more. Aggie said,

‘I’ll be honest with you: this wouldn’t be my first choice of subject matter. But since it’s what I’ve got, I’m going to make it as honest and hard-hitting as possible. I want to keep a sense of integrity.’

‘Absolutely’ said Wilf.

She grinned at him. ‘I reckon we can be a bit subversive if we put our minds to it, don’t you think, Wilf?’

Wilf laughed again.

‘I should think so!’ he said, in a pathetically forced falsetto.

Paul came back with refreshments. Wilf was already twisting around in his chair to stop the rumbling, and lunged for a biscuit before the tray was on the desk. Aggie assessed him with serious green eyes.

‘I can see’ she said ‘that you like your food, Wilf’.

All through the rest of the meeting, that comment sat miserably at the back of Wilf’s mind, and he resolved never to eat in her presence again.

There was a map of the world tacked onto Paul’s wall, scored with lines and cross-hatching in different colours. Green for one series, blue for another, red for Aggie’s cutting edge guides. Thick black lines closed off the countries that were already out of bounds—the Discomfort Zone, immersed in civil or international war, or riven with terrorism and banditry. Aggie thought the criteria were too cautious.

‘These are books for adventurers,’ she said, ‘people who want to see what’s really going on. We can’t opt out at the first sign of trouble. I mean, there’s trouble everywhere you go.’

But Paul was adamant. ‘Cutting edge’ he insisted ‘doesn’t have to mean reckless. I’m not having my writers blown to bits or taken hostage, even in the name of honesty. They’re still travel writers, Aggie. Not war correspondents’. He winked at Wilf. ‘Told you this one would be trouble’.

Aggie gave Wilf a playful nudge and he nearly jumped out his skin.

‘Oh, Wilf and I will soon overcome your caution, Paul’ she said, ‘won’t we Wilf?’

Paul beamed from one to the other.

‘There you go’, he said, putting his hands in his beautifully tailored trouser pockets. ‘I knew you two would get on like a house on fire’.

From the harbour wall, where the tide once lapped and fishing boats nagged at their moorings, an expanse of tall reeds now extends to the horizon. This is Hissing Marsh, where drowned sailors are said to crawl as close to dry land as they can, to whisper their names lest the living forget. Stand and listen for a while to the breathing of the grasses and you do, indeed, begin to make out syllables and words. A flight of stone steps descends from the end of the jetty, no longer into water but down to an almost hidden wooden walkway. Follow this as it winds between the head-high reeds and presently forms a wide, westward arc. A rhythmic thump and rustle, deeper and further than the sailors’ whispers, are the only clue to your whereabouts. Then, suddenly, the lane rounds a shallow headland; the thump becomes a crash, the rustle a roar, and you’re at the rocky end of Hestyn Beach. Clamber over the dunes and pick your way through stones and driftwood heaped here by the waves. Now a three-mile crescent of sand sweeps out before you, pummelled by a steely-grey sea.

Not steely-grey: give the place a chance. To be fair, it might be a limpid blue in high summer. Wilf scribbles a correction. Lambert Stokes, leaning at the counter waiting for their order, lobs a comment at him, but Wilf can’t hear it over the sizzle of the coffee machine.

Halfway along the beach a concrete ramp leads up to the quiet resort also called Hestyn Beach and made up of a scattering of cafés and shops, strung along the seafront and up the solitary street that shelters behind it.

Lambert sets down their coffees and Wilf slips his notebook into his anorak pocket.

‘How are the legs?’ asks Lambert, scraping a chair closer to the table. Wilf lifts the leg of his jeans to reveal a fretwork of scratches above his ankle.

‘My stupid fault’ he concedes. ‘I should have worn walking socks’.

‘No point’ says Lambert, with a touch of pride. ‘Those gorse bushes will find a way to bite you, whatever you do. Better warn your readers’. He jabs a finger towards Wilf’s anorak pocket. ‘Tell them they can take the inland road. Less direct, but relatively painless’.

Now he tells me, thinks Wilf, sucking the foam that forms half his cappuccino. But still, he’s exhilarated by their walk, by the first sight of the sea and the salt now prickling his flesh in the café’s steamy air.

‘Give us a shout’ calls the café-owner from behind his worktop ‘if you want another cup’.

Lambert Stokes leans back in his seat, one hand poised on the table edge. He looks like an 18th-century gent posing for a portrait. He’s waiting, Wilf knows, to show off more of his knowledge, but for the moment Wilf’s mind is numbed by cold sea air and stinging legs and he can’t dredge up a single question to ask about Hestyn.

‘Here it comes’ says the café-owner, folding his arms on the counter. A misty rain fingers the window, obscuring the street and dissolving into slow runnels over the etched mirror-image words ‘Sunbeam Café’. There’s no sign of life outside at all. Wilf wonders how two cafés, a donut stall and a chippie can possibly survive in this place, but he decides to leave that question until their host is out of earshot. Lambert Stokes regards him with serenity. He’s a tall, thin man with hair curling into almost horizontal tufts around a bald dome. The nose is hooked and the eyes protrude slightly, giving the general impression of a scrawny but dignified bird of prey. He seems in no hurry; just sits there ready to swoop and pounce whenever a query might show itself. Wilf clears his throat.

‘So… Er… What’s the history of Hestyn Beach? As a, a resort, I mean?’

‘Ah’. Lambert taps his bony fingers once on the table-top. ‘Well, you have to go back to the 1860s and the opening of the rail link. Great excitement, grand plans…’ His voice takes on a stagey roundness. ‘Hestyn was sure its fortune was made. It was on the map, as it were. Every steam engine drawing up at the halt would be pulling carriages full of metaphorical gold…’

Wilf scrabbles to retrieve his notebook and pen. Evidently he’s in for the full WI/Round Table lecture. For an hour and a half his dodgy shorthand flies across the pages to Lambert’s dictation. They order second cappuccinos. They break off for Wilf to dive into the half-stocked newsagents next door and buy a new pad. The weather clears abruptly; the street reappears, bleached in sharp coastal light. The café-owner loiters behind his counter, wiping the surface occasionally or rearranging the mini-packs of shortbread biscuits. Every now and then he grunts his appreciation of Lambert’s anecdotes. At about ten to twelve he slaps his hands on the counter, looks at the clock on the wall and says,

‘Here we go. Better get cooking.’

Wilf glances round, puzzled. The place is still deserted. The only sound is the yodelling of seagulls at the autumn sun; even the sea is silenced here, hidden from ears and eyes by the line of buildings running across the end of the street.

‘So, in consequence’, Lambert is declaiming, ‘the east–west line was abandoned, the Majestic Hotel and Ballroom remained on the drawing board…’

As Wilf returns to his notes he hears a scuffling outside. The door rattles open and a box-like tartan shopping trolley trundles in, followed by an old lady only a couple of inches taller, who registers the two customers with bland surprise and then hollers at the café-owner:

‘Didn’t last, then, Vic, thank God!’

‘Nope, soon cleared up, Millie’.

And—’Let’s hope it keeps off for the rest of the day’—comes another voice behind Millie, and all at once the café is heaving with people, most of them over 70, jostling around the counter, bumping into the tables, knocking Wilf’s jacket onto the ground, and the air is thick with the smell of bacon and beans and brewing tea. Lambert holds up an elegant hand, unable to make himself heard over the cackle and gossip and sodden coughs, and mouths:

‘Perhaps we should reconvene elsewhere.’.

Reluctantly, Wilf puts away his notes and prepares to leave the hotspot of Hestyn Beach.

‘We needn’t go far’ says Lambert, as they emerge into unexpectedly warm sunshine. ‘Le Soleil will be empty now’. He leads the way across the road and into the resort’s second café, directly opposite the Sunbeam. This is a more bohemian affair, with square, wooden tables, candles dripping wax over bottles and framed abstract splotches on the walls. All are in shadow; the sunlight falls short of this side of the street.

‘Young mums’, says Lambert, as if addressing a gathering, ‘and teenagers from Hestyn during the school holidays—that’s the usual clientele.’

But not today.

They have toasted sandwiches while Lambert gives Wilf a potted history of Hestyn town’s harbour.

‘Yet another abortive attempt to boost Hestyn’s fortunes’, he explains. ‘The fishing village was in decline and had long since accepted its lot after slow, creeping centuries of deposit had separated the boats from their port. Hestyn was resigned to a mouldering decline. Until Caractacus Lane came along’. He relishes the name, rolling the ‘r’ and kicking the ‘c’s like a percussionist. ‘Mr Lane—or Lord Lane, as he styled himself—moved into the Big House on Great Hood some time in the early 18th century, and took it upon himself to reintroduce Hestyn to the sea. He drafted in a workforce from the surrounding farms and villages, to build the stone harbour wall and its fan of houses, and then to dig channels into the silt and entice the sea back. Like a King Canute in reverse’. The scheme, Lambert explains, was a dismal failure. Wilf’s pen pauses over his page.

‘So… it’s never really served as a harbour at all?’

‘Never. A mere folly, from its inception to the present day. Land’s too marshy for channels. Soaks up water like a sponge.’

‘You didn’t mention that in your town walk’ says Wilf.

Lambert wipes melted cheese from his mouth in a delicate movement.

‘Mmm… Strange to say, it’s not a story that goes down well with the natives. The townsfolk find the whole misadventure rather … embarrassing’.

‘Embarrassing?’ Wilf checks Lambert’s face for signs of humour. ‘Some rich bloke’s madcap scheme, 300 years ago?’

‘Well, you see…’ Lambert fiddles with his paper napkin. ‘They feel it makes the town seem rather … foolish’.

He meets Wilf’s incredulous eye and smirks. ‘Yeees, it is bizarre. But every community has histories it accepts and those it doesn’t, as we all know. Hestyn would far rather think of itself as the former home of a brave and thriving fishing fleet than as a wealthy lunatic’s whim’.

Wilf rubs his chin, wondering what the hell to write. He knows all about communities denying their pasts, but this is such an inocuous and a distant past—most places would grab it with both hands, as a distraction from worse reputations.

‘If Hestyn wants to attract the tourists’ he comments, ‘a lunatic’s whim is just the sort of oddity they should promote. That sort of thing’s always good for business.’

‘Quite so, but’—Lambert lowers his voice; Le Soleil’s patron is making his curious way around the room, tidying tidy chairs and brushing spotless tables—’I don’t think Hestyn really knows what business is, these days’.

‘Well? Was Mr Stokes any help to you?’

Gwennie Price ladels peas into a shiny mound on Wilf’s plate.

‘He was invaluable, thanks. He’s going to show me how to get to Hestyn House tomorrow. I got into a muddle when I tried to find it’.

‘Yes… it keeps itself to itself, the Big House. What’s left of it’.

Gwennie returns to the kitchen, leaving Wilf to his haddock, potatoes and peas in the living room. He seems to be given supper in here as a special privilege. The telly’s on, and a woman in a wheelchair is singing some show-stopper. Wilf feels the tears welling, against his will or inclination. He glances around. No photographs. No diplomas or certificates on the wall. No evidence of a Mr Price or any little Prices. This might be any room in any town that’s still reasonably intact. Wilf decides that, for all her chattiness, Gwennie Price is something of an enigma. One of those people who can talk and talk and reveal nothing of any substance. ‘Small talk’: it’s a good term, decides Wilf.

‘Get beyond the small talk’—that’s one of Paul’s favourite exhortations. Wilf has had to learn how to do that. A part of him has always thought of it as bad form to look for the dirt under other people’s carpets. When they were working on their cutting edge guides, his reluctance to dig too far, to quiz locals or seek out deprived corners, was a constant irritation to Aggie. She said he was shallow. She said he was too happy to blink at the sun on the water, and ignore all the crap underneath.

Well, thinks Wilf, taking a forkful of fish, is that so terrible? Why shouldn’t we strive to make life as pleasant and superficial as we can? We shouldn’t we all make small talk and look at the pretty views? Get on with it and stay out of trouble—that’s all most people want from life, isn’t it? And then his thoughts and the wallpaper and the weeping contestant on the TV screen all melt into one sublime sensation on his tongue, as Wilf realises he’s eating the most exquisite piece of haddock he’s ever tasted in his life. He doesn’t even particularly like haddock. But now he can hardly bear to eat any more of it, knowing that with every bite taken there’s one bite less to take. For the first time since he left his house on this trip Wilf forgets to be homesick. He tries to remember the other meals Gwennie’s cooked for him: full breakfast this morning, supper last night—were they as delicious as this? He enjoyed them, in an absent way; they left him satisfied and full. But nothing like this. Wilf’s fork slides into another velvet-soft portion of fish. He can hear Gwennie humming to herself in the kitchen. She must have hit her peak this evening.

Lambert’s reply is entwined and muffled in shrubbery.

‘Sorry?’

Lambert turns back to face him. Twigs and shreds are sprouting from his hair.

‘I was a history teacher.’

‘Here?’

Wilf tries to straighten up and scrapes his head on the cage of overhead bushes. All around them the greenery trembles and hisses.

‘No, no, not here. In my previous life.’

Lambert returns to his task, heaving and hacking new growth from the path, passing the weight of branches and leaves over his shoulder to Wilf, who hauls them behind him in turn and ducks through the space before they spring back into place. It’s taken them nearly an hour to walk the five hundred yards from the point where the clifftop fades into jungle. Lambert has apologised for the mess as if they’re in his living room; he cleared as much as he could only two months before, he says, but one old duffer is no defence against intruders such as these.

For a while they labour on, developing a rhythm of sorts: the thwack of Lambert’s walking stick, the rattle of unsettled bushes, the push of their misty breath. After a few minutes Lambert turns once more, half leaning against a net of hanging foliage.

‘War. That was the mainstay of the syllabus. Day after day, one stood before the drooping heads of bored adolescents, dictating battle dates and treaty names and casualty figures. With the occasional extra-curricular foray into gory detail, to sustain their consciousness. Medieval weaponry was a particular favourite, and the specific damage inflicted thereby’. He waggles his waggles his head and releases a shower of leaves. ‘Conflict is not what it was, I find. Gone are the days when wars had distinguishable combatants, fixed battles, beginnings and endings.’ Lambert gives a sigh that makes him sag in the middle, then perks up a little. ‘Although I suppose it never was like that, for those who were in the thick of it.’

Wilf nods uncomfortably. Lambert staggers as the thicket begins to buckle under his weight, and brandishes his stick ready for the next assault.

‘I suppose in the end’ he concludes ‘I tired of the din of it. A thousand years of killing—such a noisy business. So I moved on to pastures new’.

They resume their slow advance, and when Lambert speaks again the words disappear among the branches. Wilf hopes it’s something about nearing their destination, and sure enough, when the next armload is shifted to one side, he catches a glimpse of open sky, a grassy ridge and a low, golden sparkle of stone on the horizon.

‘There! That’s the garden wall’ cries Lambert. They stumble out onto clear ground, slapped by a cold wind, and make for the remains of the wall, which, Wilf can now see, is only about four feet high and ragged at the top, where stones have fallen or been pilfered or have simply worn away. It stands on a slight rise, and the two men climb towards it, Lambert waving and planting his stick with every step. From their lower position they can see nothing beyond the wall. They reach the sharper, two-foot slope that forms its base and without warning Lambert veers right, signalling for Wilf to follow with a swoop of the stick. They limp along the incline, through spurts of lush grass that have flourished in sheltered spots. Stringy weeds and young rhododenron-looking shoots grow through the cracks between stones and whip at them with every gust. Wilf stoops behind Lambert, letting him take the brunt of the weather. He watches his feet and concentrates on the flap and flutter of their jackets. When Lambert comes to a halt he nearly knocks him over.

‘Voilà! The Manor House of Hestyn!’

He gestures grandly to his left. Reluctantly, Wilf leaves the shelter of Lambert’s back and peers around him. The wind forces his breath back up his nose. He clutches Lambert’s arm to avoid being blown down the slope. They’ve reached a pair of tall iron gates, one half fallen where the supporting wall has been eaten away, and poised at an improbable angle. Elaborate scrolls and symbols are blurred by rust: the upright gate is topped by a blob that might once have been a coat of arms. Lambert is already shouldering a route through the gap between the gates, but Wilf isn’t ready to move yet. He crouches into the wall’s cavity, one leg propped against the hovering gate, ignoring the gripe of pain in the small of his back, and he gawps.

Ahead of him, a mossy drive leads between low humps and mounds that may sketch the layout of a formal garden. It’s not a long drive—no ceremonial twists and turns, no pompous statuary or ranked trees—just a short, straight approach to the house itself. Lambert, loping ahead, is nearly there. A fan of steps leads to the entrance, which is framed by a frenzy of carvings. From this distance Wilf has an impression of dragons, snakes, monkeys, grotesque unnameable creatures, all slithering and groping around the vast front door, getting a good look at anyone who ventures in. There are four high windows to either side of the porch on the ground floor; the first and second storeys have six smaller windows each. One or two hold on to a few last, sorry slices of the original glass; most are boarded up. The lower boards are festooned with graffiti. At the end of the west wing is a square tower, built of dark red brick, in ugly contrast to the golden-white stone of the house itself. Piercing the length of the roofline and the bowing gutters are green, bulbous shapes, vaguely oriental and probably a blaze of copper in their heyday. And strangest and most confusing of all is the rippling, winking wave of texture and light that brings the main façade to life. This is what roots Wilf to the spot, and what presently drives him in clumsy pursuit of Lambert through the gap and along the springing drive. When they draw closer to the building he can see that the effect is caused by hundreds of tiny shells, pieces of coloured glass, fragments of jewellery, metal buckles and buttons, nails and coins—all forced into the mortar and the stonework itself, and brushed, in places, with a thin layer of decaying plaster.

‘One of Lord Lane’s little touches’ explains Lambert, as Wilf runs his hand across the weird mosaic. ‘He had most of the house rebuilt in his own inimitable style, and then it was all covered up again by his successors. It’s only thanks to long years of neglect and harsh elements that all this came to light again.’

As if to illustrate his point the wind suddenly rushes up the drive and shoves them forward. Lambert hoiks back a bolt on the massive oak door, where a wisp of graffiti has wilted into the blackened wood.

‘A few youngsters come here from town now and then’ says Lambert. ‘I used a padlock for a while. They just broke through the windows’. He smiles and disappears into the gloom.

The door shuts behind them with a snort. They’re standing in a hall, lit only in weak patches where the sun has squeezed between the boards. The floor is hard and pale—marble, maybe—and Wilf can make out a wide, stone fireplace, a flight of stairs and a minstrels’ gallery. He begins to say something, then stops. There are other people present. Three or four, maybe more, watching them from the gallery rail. And on the far side of the stairs he catches a movement, checked almost as soon as he notices it. Terror clenches his guts. Simultaneously, Lambert and someone near the stairs spin round for a pincer attack. Wilf shrinks into his jacket and takes a step back, and so does a second person,. somewhere to his left, vanishing into the wall. Gunshot. Wilf’s whole body convulses and he lets out a yelp that’s nearly a scream.

‘Sorry’ says Lambert, smoothly. ‘I thought it might clarify matters somewhat’.

He’s wrenched a section of board from one of the windows with an almighty crack. The sliver of light broadens into a shaft and reveals a grimy, full-length mirror to the left of the stairwell. Wilf takes a couple of paces forward and his reflection returns, grey with relief. One hairline crack divides the glass in two, reminding him of the party wall in his house. The mirror-frame is a riot of flowers, grapes and putti, reduced from gold to a dull shade of sludge. As Wilf’s eyes adapt to the altered light the observers in the gallery reappear as lifesize figures in a trompe-l’oeil fresco. A fiddler tunes his instrument; a rosy-lipped boy with long curls executes a drumroll on his tabor and regards the visitors with blank impudence; two other youths—singers, perhaps—apparently lean forward on the balustrade. Pauled cobwebs quiver from the ceiling above them, but the figures themselves are remarkably vivid and fresh. Lambert beams at them with paternal satisfaction.

‘Yeees, the boys are in tip-top condition. Our teenage visitors have failed, as yet, to gain access to the gallery, or no doubt they would have added a little robust artwork of their own. Although, as you can see,’—he extends balletic arms—’the interior is refreshingly free of graffiti. I don’t know why. They come in here and smoke, drink, inject, or whatever …’ He indicates an empty vodka bottle, wedged into the remains of a fire in the hearth. ‘But for some reason, once inside, they put away their spray-cans and felt-tips. Maybe they’re put off by our vigilant friends up there’.

‘Yes’ agrees Wilf hoarsely, ‘I can see they might be a touch … daunting’..

Lambert bends his head to study Wilf’s drained face, then gives him two measured pats on the shoulder, letting his hand rest briefly each time. Pat. Pat. It’s a gesture full of comfort and sympathy. Wilf feels the tension leave his muscles, and has to stifle the urge to sob.

The first house on this site was built by a Norman adventurer. Gilbert de la Croix came across with William the Conqueror, snapping up a knighthood and this remote plot of land for his trouble. There are no records of Gilbert’s property but it was almost certainly stone-built and designed to withstand attack. For nearly 600 years the house was handed down through the same family—sons and grandsons, brothers and nephews and even one or two daughters—who, in their turn, redecorated, refurnished, demolished and extended. By the 13th century de la Croix’s descendants had built an entirely new house, complete with castellated wall, which provided protection for Hestyn’s inhabitants during a spate of forays by local bandits and pirates venturing in from the coast. In the late 16th century Hestyn House adopted a more domestic than defensive style. Away with the corner turrets, the gatehouse and the arrowslits, in with the brick chimneys, fancy plasterwork and a knot garden. By the time civil war broke out in 1642 the place was a confusion of styles, heaped together with little symmetry or logic. Elizabeth Delcrarr-Whyte inherited the pile when her two brothers were killed fighting on opposite sides in the Battle of Lostwithiel. Elizabeth’s late husband, Peregrine Whyte, had been a staunch Parliamentarian; after his death his widow unwisely switched to the royalist cause. When Cromwell’s troops stormed through the area in 1646 they paused to bombard Hestyn House and Elizabeth and her household fled into obscurity. What remained of the estate was abandoned to a neighbouring farmer, who kept his cattle in the great hall and his pigs in the drawing room.

Lambert is heading past the stairs and towards a door at the western end of the hall.

‘We’ll save the rest for later’ he promises, coquettishly. ‘It’s well worth the wait’.

They enter a room lined with dark panels. Half the window-boardings lie splintered on the floor, but most of the light soaks into the wood, leaving the room enclosed in permanent murk. Lambert fishes about in his jacket, which is pitted with pockets, and produces a torch the size of a biro. He directs the thin beam around the dour panelling.

‘A 19th-century travesty’ he comments. ‘But it has hidden depths’.

As they cross the room he shines the torch towards the centre of the floor. A charred nest of sticks and moss, and a couple of twisted tin cans, sit in a deep stain on the floorboards.

‘There’s a long tradition of igniting unauthorised fires in this house. Sometimes with disastrous effect’. As he talks, Lambert feels along the panels, pushing gently with one hand and giving each one a sharp knock in the corner with the top of his stick. ‘Whole place burned down three times. By rebels in the early days; by a servant in the Tudor era—a candle set fire to the draperies—and once in the early 19th century … Ah yes! Here we are—panel number five…’

The slat of plain wood dislodges itself under his pressure and one side swings a couple of inches towards him. Lambert hoists his long legs over the lower part of the wall into a passage about two feet deep.

‘Come along! And take care—not much breathing space in here!’

The passageway is barely wider than Wilf; he elbows his way between the walls, keeping a keen eye on the slim stream of torchlight that bounces along ahead of Lambert. Swags of cobweb appear and disappear. There’s a cold draught coming from above; when Wilf looks up he sees only the faint paleness of the walls soaring upward, higher, surely, than the ceiling of the room they’ve just left. Just as well: Wilf doesn’t like confined spaces, and it’s only the sense of fresh air somewhere over his head that prevents him reversing back to the secret panel.

‘Watch your step!’ commands Lambert. ‘We’re going up!’

Wilf stubs his boots against roughly hewn steps, shallow at first and then increasingly steeper as they turn a corner to the left. The walls change character, from milky stone to abrasive brick; they’re in darkness, now, except for Lambert’s torch, which strims from side to side, giving flashes of the deep-red brickwork. Wilf struggles to control his breathing. He stays close behind Lambert and is almost kicked in the face a few times. He steadies himself against the wall and recoils immediately from something moist and furry. He’s still rubbing his hand vigorously on the back of his jeans when Lambert barks:

‘Halt!’

An insistent, loose rattle of wood, the growl of a bolt being drawn, and the world opens out again. They’re in a perfectly round room with a stone-flagged floor and three leaded windows, filtering in a mellow, buttery light. Words and some sort of diagram are hacked into the sill beneath the central window. Glad to be out of the passageway, Wilf moves across for a closer look and realises, with a start, that they’re two storeys up in the tower, overlooking forested wilderness behind the estate. He peers at the carved message. It’s masterfully done, each letter flecked with a serif or trailing an elaborate tail.

‘John Auvrice—his prison and his refuge 1798’. The diagram is actually three crude symbols: a ship, a skull and a gallows. Wilf looks quizzically at Lambert, who’s leaning on his walking stick, recovering his breath after the climb.

‘Prison and refuge’ says Lambert cryptically, evidently enjoying himself. ‘One of the many mysteries of Hestyn House’.

She had a boyfriend. Naturally. Wilf had learned to assume that the odds were against him in these matters. Ridiculous word—’boyfriend’—for a fully consummated adult relationship, but Wilf persisted in using it to himself as a small act of malice. And in the hope that he might transfer some of its transitory, childish connotations to the relationship itself. Unfortunately for Wilf, ‘boyfriend’ was a wholly inadequate title for Aggie’s partner. Wilf first met him in a restaurant, a trendily casual Lebanese place with large, bare tables and scattered dishes to share. Aggie wanted to pick his brain, she said. He wondered whether this was a new euphemism for giving the sack. He’d written three guides for her by then and she’d dismantled and reconstructed every one, complaining that Wilf was too cautious, too polite, just too damn nice about everything. He didn’t imagine his brain had any pickings fit for Aggie’s requirements. He approached the restaurant with a heavy heart, and it grew heavier when he passed the wide front window and spotted her talking to her companion, touching the back of his hand. Surely, thought Wilf, she’s not going to fire me in front of her boyfriend?

‘Here he is—our roving reporter’ announced Aggie as he trudged in and almost walloped the back of another diner’s head with his backpack.

Hisham stood up and extended an arm across the table. He wasn’t at all what Wilf had expected. Older, for a start—about 45, maybe, with stylishly greying hair. And elegant, in a suit that couldn’t have come off the peg. His fingers were long and slim. As they shook hands Wilf’s backpack slipped from his shoulder and landed heavily in the crook of his elbow, nearly yanking Hisham off his feet.

‘Sorry’ muttered Wilf.

‘No problem’ said Hisham, smoothly, tugging his immaculate jacket into line. The weight of the backpack had pulled Wilf’s rainjacket half off, impeding his efforts to retrieve it.

‘Sit down, please, join us’ said Hisham—as if he owns the place, thought Wilf. He struggled into a seat and decided to hate the man. He couldn’t deny his beauty, though. Extraordinary blue-grey eyes, the exact colour of his suit, and a smile that he unveiled like a secret weapon. An accent that carved English banalities into delicate, lacy shapes. No wonder Aggie gazed at him like that. Wilf fumbled for the menu and tried to shrug his rainjacket onto the back of the chair.

‘I hope you don’t mind’ said Aggie ‘but I want your advice about something. I’m thinking of going freelance’.

Wilf was assaulted by several emotions in succession. Relief that she wasn’t getting shot of him. Elation that she wanted his advice. And then sudden alarm as he realised she’d be leaving Sitwell’s and disappearing over the horizon with bloody bespoke-tailored Hisham.

‘Agnes is far too wild to be chained to a desk’ said Hisham and Wilf glowered at the menu, refusing to see them keel towards each other. He hadn’t even known her full name was Agnes. He became aware that he should speak, and said,

‘I thought your name was Agatha.’ Issued it like a challenge. As if Hisham might have got it wrong.

‘Noone on earth is allowed to call me Agnes’ she said ‘except Hisham. He makes it sound so exotic’.

‘Us bleeding foreigners’ said Hisham ‘have our uses after all’.

And Wilf was obliged to laugh, because Aggie did. Agnes, he said to himself, trying to give the name music. Agnes. But he couldn’t say it aloud because he wasn’t Hisham.

She started reminding Wilf how long he’d been writing guidebooks, making ends meet as a freelance; she told him how suffocated she was, working for a company, going to the same corner of the same building and staring at the same screen every day. She resented the notion that other people owned her time.

‘Paid slavery’ she said. ‘That’s what it is’. Then added: ‘Put the menu down, Wilf, and take your bloody coat off’.

He’d only managed to shuck off the top half of his rainjacket, and his forearms were pinioned to his chair. He did as she said, and caught her watching him with that amused exasperation mothers reserve for their toddlers. He felt a momentary expansion in his chest, and cleared his throat to disguise a sharp, shallow reflex of breath. He thought: she likes this. Bossing me around. Hisham was taking the menu from his hand, leaving him free to untangle himself. Wilf wondered whether Hisham’s smile was a little strained at the corners and thought: bet she doesn’t tell him what to do.

Aggie was planning to give up the job. She called it The Great Escape. She asked for Wilf’s advice.

‘I’m not the best person to ask’ admitted Wilf. ‘I’m hopeless with money. Basically, I just travel around’.

He rolled up the sleeves of his jumper. It struck him that, if he played it right, the contrast with Hisham’s tailoring might actually work in his favour. He said,

‘I know what you mean about being suffocated. I get like that just coming back to my own house sometimes’.

‘Oh dear’ said Hisham sympathetically. ‘That’s quite a sad state of affairs’. He lifted the arm that had rested across the back of Aggie’s chair and gestured to a waiter with a balletic arc of the hand. Aggie scowled at him. Wilf noticed that she was leaning forward, and wasn’t in contact with Hisham’s arm after all. She said,

‘Hisham, wait a minute. Wilf hasn’t chosen anything yet’.

Hisham said very little during their meal. Aggie interrogated Wilf about his travels, and occasionally, in response to a description or anecdote Hisham would tilt his beautiful head and say,

‘How fascinating. How enthralling’—singing the words, performing them. Wilf couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic. But he could tell that Aggie was hooked—not by him, not even by his experiences, but by her own plans. She was smitten with the prospect of freedom, and he knew how to fuel her infatuation. He talked about castles and palaces and glaciers and deserts and sparkling cityscapes and sinuous dunes as soft as fur. He added a few places he’d never seen except on telly or in other people’s pictures. He filled in details: climbing a hideously swaying ladder to sleep on a roof in Athens. Chatting to a Russian waitress whose great-uncle had once returned from a business trip with a copy of Vogue hidden between layers of his underwear. Sharing a watermelon with a carriageload of schoolchildren in Sicily.

‘Why’ demanded Aggie ‘did you never give me this copy?’

Wilf shrugged. ‘It wasn’t in my brief…’

Paul had guessed she’d want to be out on the road before long. He’d told Wilf as much. ‘That girl’ he’d said ‘is not a corporate creature’. Sitwell’s was installed in its new building by now, with its urbanely tutting doors and its air-conditioning and windows that couldn’t be opened. Every day, Aggie saw the same people, had the same conversations, breathed the same air. Wilf reckoned she’d be out before the month was up.

But he didn’t expect to get home to her voice that same evening. When he let himself in the answerphone light was winking. She must have phoned from the counter at the restaurant: he could hear the drone and percussion of diners in the background. Not even Hisham had a mobile phone then.

‘Hi Wilf’ Aggie’s voice called into the dark room. Wilf stood over the machine, still in his rainjacket.

‘Sorry to pester you’ she said. ‘Just a thought. I know you’re down to do Spain after Christmas. Do you mind if I come along?’

Hidden Gems chapters 9 to 16

2009-08-01T09:55:00.000-07:00

Wilf can see no way out of the tower room except for the way they came in. He’s impatient to see the rest of the main house and waits tetchily while Lambert shuffles around the rim of the room, tapping the flagstones as he goes. One stone gives an a barely imperceptible shudder; the stick produces an echo instead of a dull knock.

‘This is it’ says Lambert, and gets down on his knees. ‘Very effective. Took me a long time to find it. Months. But I knew there must be a route to the next floor’. He’s scrabbling at the edge of the stone, struggling to get a purchase as he’s wittering on. ‘You’d think it would be easy to remember, wouldn’t you, once I’d tracked it down, but with the room being circular … confusing, rather … ha!’

Under his pressure the flagstone vibrates, growls, and finally, with a hideously drawn-out croak, tips on its axis and upends itself, coming to rest vertically like a headstone. Wilf glares at the pitch-black cavity it’s uncovered. Lambert grins up at him.

‘Do you dare? I can promise you it’s not as bad as it looks. Not quite’.

Terror seizes Wilf’s mind and muscles. He speaks with an effort.

‘That goes into the ground, not up to the next floor’.

Coward, says a memory of Aggie’s voice. The word billows and trails around his thoughts. He turns away to focus on the trees through the window.

‘Would you like to go back?’ asks Lambert, gently. He sounds crestfallen. After a silence he carries on: ‘It does lead upwards, in fact. Quite ingenious. But I must say I suffered some trepidation myself, the first time I ventured in’.

Wilf hears a scuffling and turns back to see Lambert sitting with his legs dangling into the hole and both hands braced on the floor behind him. His voice stutters as he lowers himself in—

‘I’ll just have a decco before we leave. Kindly don’t shut the door!’

Lambert slides into the darkness like a snake into a pool, then seems to make contact with a firm surface below and dips his head and shoulders out of sight.

Wilf saunters back to the window and leans back, straining for a view towards the house. He can see a wall—more recent and in better shape than the perimeter wall—and beyond it a series of long metal ridges, slicing through fronds and branches: the remnants of greenhouses, Wilf assumes. So that must be the old kitchen garden. A scuttling underfoot. He returns to the flagstone and places his hand delicately on its upper edge. He could easily give it a shove, cover the hole and go, leaving Lambert like Rapunzel in the tower. The sense of power over another life gives him an almost erotic thrill. Alarmed, he snatches his hand away from the stone and rams it into his back pocket. There’s a thump and a movement somewhere towards the wall. Curiosity is getting the better of him. Wilf squats, takes several deep breaths and calls:

‘Lambert, hold on! I’m coming!’

From deep within the wall comes a faint reply: ‘Right-ho!’

Wilf is shorter than Lambert; by the time his feet meet solid ground his head is almost under the floor and he has to twist uncomfortably to retain his desperate grip on the edge of the opening. Then he’s submerged in the dark, stale air, inhaling dust and age, afraid to move in any direction. Something flickers to his right: torchlight. Lambert’s voice says,

‘Over here. Mind your head.’

Wilf bends double and ducks under a broad, supporting beam of some kind to his left. He feels the panic rising from his belly and holds his breath. Four spider-steps get him past the beam and he can straighten up again. The thought occurs to him that they’ll have to do all this again to get out; he dismisses it and concentrates on that wavering finger of light.

‘That’s it—keep going’ says a much closer voice, and there’s Lambert, apparently hanging in mid-air. When Wilf reaches him Lambert shines the torch downwards to show that he’s balanced on an impossibly narrow stairway of bricks, each one jutting out at a right angle to the wall and only as wide as one foot. He swivels round and seems to float up, steadying himself with one hand and wielding the torch with the other. Wilf climbs after him, hand over hand, foot over foot. A scraping and a squeaking, a glorious expansion of light and they’re staggering onto the third storey through a sliding panel door.

This is a much smaller room, peppered with objects and remnants of furniture: a broken chair, a candlestick, an unidentifiable hank of worked wood. There’s a fireplace too and a disproportionately broad chimneybreast. Soft pigeon murmurings and the whisper of wings drift from somewhere above.

‘All this’ says Lambert, waving his stick at the scattered objects, ‘is relatively recent. Someone used this as a bolthole after the last official inhabitants had long gone, I suspect’.

‘You mean someone went through all that secret passage business just for a bit of peace and quiet?’

Wilf pushes a wedge of hair from his forehead and frowns at the grit and dirt that come off on his hand.

‘Or for safety’s sake’ says Lambert, adding with a tilt of the head, ‘Prison or refuge?’

‘Come on, Lambert’ snaps Wilf. ‘Enough mystery. Let’s have some facts’.

But Lambert has already set off through a connecting door to a second, even smaller room, curved at one end like a segment of orange. The curve of wall is covered, ceiling to floor, with etched figures and symbols, faded and scratched away in places but dominated by the clear outline of a massive crucifix. The areas between its shaft and crossbar seem to be peopled by saints: Wilf can see traces of haloes, though most—along with some of the faces—have been scrubbed out. There are phrases as well, tucked around the edges in minute calligraphy, and also partially obliterated. He makes out the words ‘Dies’ and ‘avid’.

Lambert waits while he studies it all, then says,

‘Facts are rather thin on the ground, I fear. Clues are mainly what we have’.

They complete their circuit of the third floor, passing through a cell-like space with nothing of interest except a recess hiding a long drop to the ground—a privvy, explains Lambert, which would once have deposited sewage straight into a rank and watery ditch. Then, to Wilf’s great relief, they reach a normal stairwell, which spirals up to the fourth level. This is no more than an attic, with clattering floorboards, a low ceiling and wooden struts at regular intervals around the circumference. Lambert points out the rectangular slots that formerly supported partition walls. A doorless opening leads to the final flight of steps and the roof—which is safe enough, Lambert promises, as long as they keep to the edge. The outer wall is mercifully high; Wilf rests his arms on the lower castellated ledge and Lambert pokes his head over the upper, his hair flapping from side to side in the wind. For a few minutes they scan the density of treetops, brushed here and there with autumnal crimson and bronze. Lambert bellows something which is carried away out of the garden, then stoops to bring his mouth to Wilf’s ear.

‘I can tell you what I’ve pieced together about the place’ he shouts, ‘but I’m afraid it isn’t much’.

The next gust showers them with light, cold rain.

‘Let’s go down!’ yells Lambert.

As soon as they descend into the stairwell the wind is silenced and their voices boom. Wilf says,

‘Do you get a lot of visitors wanting tours?’.

‘No … ‘ says Lambert, and Wilf thinks it’s all the reply he’ll get. Then, as they re-enter the attic, Lambert goes on, ‘Matter of fact, you’re only the second this year’.

’Shame’ says Wilf. ‘Follies, secret passages, coded messages—it could be a real winner’.

‘Quite so. At present, however, we are overwhelmed with indifference. Even our friends the vodka-drinkers know nothing about the secret passage.’

They descend to the third storey and pause again at the crucifix.

‘Maybe’ suggests Wilf ‘when the guide’s published it’ll stir up a bit more interest.’

Lambert shrugs. ‘Either that, old chap, or the whole place will rot away to nothing. Or some mandarin will suddenly realise it’s there and put a road through it.’

‘Well—the state of you. I’ll have a word with that Lambert’ says Gwennie Price.

Wilf looks down at the dust and gooey cobwebs smeared across his shirt and jeans. She gives his shoulder blade a sharp little shove towards the kitchen.

‘Get those into the washing machine, off you go. I’ll find you a dressing gown.’

Wilf undresses quickly, keeping an eye on the kitchen door. Presently it opens just wide enough for Gwennie to hand in a towelling robe. She says,

‘Just stick it all in the machine and turn it to C. Half-load. Powder’s under the sink.’

The clothes grind and churn in the machine. Wilf wonders whether to wait for it to finish. He looks round the narrow kitchen. Fudge-coloured splashback tiles with vague floral patterns. A stand-alone cooker with an eye-level grill. A dishcloth neatly laid over the edge of the sink. A bunting row of tea-towels in their plastic holders. Everything gleams. There’s a box of Swan Vestas, a bundle of white candles and an frilly-edged gas-lamp on a high shelf—in case of power cuts, he supposes. Wilf opens the tall cupboard in the corner and peeks in. A boiler and a campstove. He closes the door softly. What did he expect? Another secret passage?

‘Are you decent?’

Wilf tightens the cord around his waist. The robe is too small, only just reaches his knees, and the sleeves bite his armpits. Not Gwennie’s robe—a child’s, maybe.

‘Well, I’m—’ he starts, but she’s already in, bustling past to put the kettle on, careful not to look at his knees.

‘I don’t think I’ll start any trends’ says Wilf, edging out.

‘Aha, well, you have started one, as it happens’ says Gwennie. She follows him into the dark hall. Wilf pulls on the cord again, afraid that the robe will part like curtains to reveal his boxers.

‘Had another visitor today’. She’s silhouetted against the yellow kitchen light. Wilf can see the glint of her eyes and teeth. He fights the urge to clamp a protective hand on his groin.

‘Asking for a room’ adds Gwennie in triumph. ‘I’ll have to clear the spare’. She leans towards him, sweetly. ‘I’ll need a hand, lugging some of that stuff …’

So, thinks Wilf: clothes in the washer, and here am I in my undies being roped in to shift furniture—I’m one of the family now. The kettle fumes and rattles and Gwennie starts back to the kitchen.

‘No hurry, though’ she says, over her shoulder. ‘Booked for tomorrow. Got to go somewhere else tonight, she said.’

‘She?’

Gwennie turns, startled by his tone.

‘Not a problem, is it, dear? She seems very nice.’

Wilf says, ‘No. Not a problem at all’, and makes for the stairs, escaping the artificial ring in his voice. He recognises the same sudden chill that overcame him in the Big House. The curve of the bannister under his hand; the squeak of the stair under his foot; the smell of food and air-freshener and carpets—all this domesticity, so familiar and so alien. From the kitchen he hears Gwennie humming, hears the rush of water and the soft chink of china—innocent sounds, assuming a horror-film menace. Suddenly Wilf is engulfed by a memory so vivid that, with an effort, he could re-enter it and live it again. Another ordinary house. Another woman moving around her kitchen. The same exaggerated jollity. Across 30 years or so Wilf endures the full force of homesickness with his 11-year-old self on a school exchange trip. Now, as then, he distracts himself by noting the surroundings. Green doorframes, he remembers, and rugs instead of carpets, and cooking smells, comforting but foreign. A family in translation. He switches off the recollection and with it his adult yearning for home, for his skewiff rooms and his maps, and for Aggie.

‘Tea, love?’ calls Gwennie.

Wilf pauses on the stairs, swaying slightly.

‘Lovely’ he calls back. ‘Down in just a minute’.

‘It’s a kind of escape, I suppose’.

The wicker chair crackles as Lambert leans back and sweeps a theatrical arm at the papers on his conservatory floor. Wilf sits forward, unable to arrange himself neatly in the bowl-shaped seat.

‘I do this’ he says ‘with maps’.

‘Maps? Really?’

’I like maps’ says Wilf. ‘I spread them out on the floor, like this’.

There are photocopies of pamphlets in heavy, smudged type; print-outs of genealogy charts; hand-written lists; articles cut out from newspapers and magazines. All set out in overlapping layers and framed by a foot’s-width of clear floor to allow access to the chairs.

‘It’s a strange thing’ says Lambert, reaching down for the mug of tea at his feet. ‘However violent and brutal the past, it can still be a consolation. A distraction. From the violence and brutality of the present’.

‘Over and done with, I suppose’, says Wilf.

‘Quite so’.

Wilf sips his own tea, which is too weak and too hot, and he’s drawn again to the wide, grey view of sea and sky through the window to his right. A short, sloping garden runs from the back of Lambert’s house to a low hedge and the cliff-edge, and is all but hidden from sight, now that they’re seated. They may as well be floating in mid-air. Wilf can’t imagine anyone who lives here needing an escape.

‘It’s hard to believe the world’s in such a mess,’ he says, ‘when you’re sitting here looking out at this’.

He stares towards the horizon, though in this weather it’s hard to tell where water becomes cloud. From here the sea is motionless. Wilf is irritated. He needs a force-nine gale, a walloping storm, to stir his spirit and sweep him on to the next place on his itinerary. He should be writing up his research notes now, reporting back to Paul—not sitting in Lambert’s sun-room admiring his archives. But he doesn’t quite know how to go about it, any more. Maybe he’s lost the knack. He turns various elements of Hestyn in his mind, assigning chapter heads and captions. Hissing Marsh. Hestyn Beach. The Big House. This steel line of ocean. Wilf can’t make the place out, much less chop and stack it all between the covers of a guide. He thinks of Hestyn summarised into double-page spreads, bold for place-names, italics for addresses, cleaned of typos and widows, snipped into quaint angles and details. He thinks of all the additional detail stored away on DVDs in the Sitwell files. Betraying a secret. Breaking a spell.

Lambert has replaced his mug and is sitting back again, chin up, elbows on the edges of his chair, fingers lightly laced. Preparing to enlighten. A wave of sunlight closes Wilf’s eyes, and when it’s passed he keeps them closed.

‘From what I can gather’ says Lambert, ‘—and information, as I think I have intimated, is scarce—the tower was occupied twice. Or possibly gave shelter to two sets of occupants at the same time. One, obviously, was the enigmatic soul who carved his name into the wall’.

‘John somebody’ says Wilf, to indicate that he’s still awake.

‘John Auvrice. Indeed. In 1798, as he was obliging enough to inform us. There may have been other occupants too…’

‘Occupants? Plural?’

Wilf’s eyes snap open. Despite himself, he’s intrigued.

‘Nothing concrete. But there’s a tale still told hereabouts that revolves around French soldiers, washed up on the coast during the Napoleonic Wars and holed up in the tower. Captured spies, according to one variation. Yeees … They’re said to haunt the place, naturally’.

‘Now he tells me’.

Wilf is hooked now. It occurs to him that he’s got more in common with Lambert Stokes and his futile ferreting through the past than he ever had with Aggie and her fierce, insistent concern with the present. He becomes aware of a conversation replaying somewhere in his head. He sees two figures from a distance. Himself and Aggie. Standing on a dirt track, outside an empty wooden hut. Mountains tearing across a dusty, orange sky. Wilf tries to concentrate on Lambert’s voice, to add meaning to the sound of his words. But Aggie’s flailing arms compete for attention. Her anger buzzes across the years like a dodgy radio signal, erupting into occasional clarity.

‘It’s not enough just to give in’.

That’s what she said.

‘We should be sparking off each other. We should delight in each other.’

Wilf’s reply is muffled in time and self-pity: ‘I do delight in you—’

‘It’s not enough’ says Aggie, biting off the end of his sentence, ‘just to give in. That’s not love’.

‘Difficult to verify’, Lambert Stokes is saying. ‘Especially given the circumstances. Scarcity of evidence. Difficulty of access’.

‘Data Research Act’ says Wilf, and the closeness of his voice finally snaps him into the present.

‘Precisely’ says Lambert. ‘The world has changed, as we’re always given to believe. Makes it awkward for a chap who’s just … curious. Can’t simply snoop around history any more. Some cove in every library waving forms in triplicate, demanding one’s ID card and proof of legitimate interest. One rather expects to be hauled off in a Black Maria and given the third degree’.

Wilf nods and rolls his eyes. ‘I know. I’d have a much harder time doing my job, without my publisher’s indemnity’.

‘Ah, yes—Commerically Legitimate, isn’t that the phrase?’

‘That’s it. Covers the kind of stuff I need to find out. Which is hardly a threat to national security’.

‘Trouble is’ says Lambert. ‘any harmless blighter looks suspicious to a chap who’s on the lookout for guilt.’

They smile at each other. Wilf glances at the collage of dates and names and theories at his feet, and pictures Lambert Stokes in an interview room, blinking his hawkeyes under a ring of harsh light. Abruptly, Lambert swoops forward again for his mug and scowls at the contents. ‘Stone cold … Fancy a top-up?’

Wilf doesn’t want more tea, but he accepts anyway, to put off the chore of writing up. After Lambert’s disappeared to the kitchen he sits watching the view for a moment, but the stillness eventually provokes him to his feet. He follows Lambert towards the kitchen, scuffing papers as he sidles along their edge, and finds him measuring loose tea into a pot. The light is quite different in Lambert’s kitchen—sliced and dealt into portions, arranged in squares and strips across the heavy basin and the lino floor, colouring the room in delicate, shell shades of ivory, silver and lilac. Wilf watches Lambert go about his task.

‘Nice house’ he comments.

‘Thank you.’ Lambert touches the handle of the rattling kettle as if to reassure it. Wilf goes on:

‘You were lucky to find it.’

Lambert turns to face him, leans against the sink, regards him with a strange expression. Challenging. After a pause he says,

‘It belonged to my aunt. A very frail old lady. I’m sorry to say she passed away two years ago’.

Wilf makes a few sympathetic noises, then subsides into silence. The kettle shrieks. Wilf says,

‘Anyway. It’s very nice.’

‘Yes’ agrees Lambert, pouring water over his looted tea leaves. ‘My aunt always loved the sea view’.

It wasn’t Wilf’s fault. He’s been over and over it, and he’s sure of this: he never set out to deceive Aggie. Of course, the whole relationship was a deception, in one sense: even Wilf has to concede that. But he never pretended to be someone else, to be braver, more driven, more radical or angrier than he was. He just followed his brief and did his job. No, Wilf insists to himself, it was Aggie who cast him as a certain character, and set herself up for a fall. Even when she was still at Sitwell’s, demolishing his manuscripts, berating him for being so bloody polite, so bloody complacent, Aggie seemed to believe she was helping him release his inner self.

‘Tell it like it is, Wilf’, she’d say. ‘You’re the traveller. You’re the eyes of your readers. Speak your mind’.

To Aggie, Wilf was a maverick, searching for his voice. It wouldn’t occur to her that he chose not to encounter the seamier side of life.

Not that Wilf is naïve. Not naïve, no way. He defends himself robustly as he’s trudging around Hestyn or lying in his box room with his hands behind his head, conducting yet another retrial of their relationship. Not naive. Not guilty. He reads the papers, makes the connections, knows the difference between propaganda and fact, between guidespeak and life. Wilf has no illusions about his trade. For every pretty view and beach idyll and luxury hotel, he’s very well aware, there’s a displaced community, a shanty town, an exploited workforce, a child picking through shit for enough junk to sell. For pity’s sake, he’s written enough notes about enough hell-holes to understand what goes on. But unlike Aggie—unlike Aggie’s version of him—Wilf doesn’t want to venture through back alleys or linger in the shit with the scavengers. He’s never set out to change the world. Don’t rock the boat, that’s Wilf’s motto. However good your intentions, he silently lectures Aggie, you’ll probably only make things worse. Better to concentrate on the wide, blue sky and the wide, white sand. Better to write about the glorious past, and cheer people up, than dwell on the rotting present.

After Aggie had given in her notice, Paul summoned Wilf for a tête-à-tête.

‘Between you and me, old son’ he told him, leaning confidentially across his desk, ‘this works out pretty well for us. Aggie will give us our money’s worth, once she’s off the leash. And you can tag along and keep an eye on her’. He shifted his attention to his computer screen, adding as an afterthought, ‘You’ll have to take a pay cut, of course. Sorry about that, mate, but I can’t afford to pay two fees for one book’.

Paul commissioned them to write a guide to Spain, before it slipped into the Discomfort Zone. They made their way around the country together. Aggie wrote about regional tensions, religion, race, politics. Wilf covered the practicalities: which buses they caught, what they ate, where they stayed, how much it all cost. If they fell into conversation with a market trader or a drunk in a bar or a priest in a church, Aggie pumped for views about the government and the price of tomatoes, Wilf picked up tips on cafés and short-cuts. And everything—the dust and sweat, the buses that never turned up, the blisters and mouth-ulcers, the meal that gave them the runs—all of it re-emerged in Wilf’s text shimmering with romance. He read some of his notes to her as they sat cooling their feet in a fountain on a Barcelona square.

‘Wilf’ she moaned, ‘it’s so gushing’.

She emphasised the word by giving him a little shove with her whole torso, like a cat. Then she sat forward, elbows on knees, chin on hands. She moved her feet in the water and said through her fingers,

‘It is amazing, though’.

Wilf watched as the loose knot she’d made of her hair lazily unravelled and slid apart, revealing the grubby back of her neck. He turned a couple of pages of his notebook. If he put his hand on her neck would she take it as a come-on? Wilf didn’t understand the rules. They shared rooms to save money. She was startlingly relaxed about changing and washing, padding around semi-naked in his presence. On their tedious, airless bus trips she often snoozed on his shoulder. But there were no lingering looks or faltering sentences to hint at anything more than a working friendship. Wilf struggled with this language as he did with his ropey Spanish. Every exchange, however casual, was fraught with doubt and effort. He made his decision and laid a hand lightly on her shoulder. She didn’t tense up or wriggle or react in any way.

‘I love you’ he managed not to say aloud. ‘And I never want to go home’.

Aggie sighed a full, long sigh that made the muscles work under his palm. She said,

‘God, I stink. If Hisham knew how long I’m going between showers he’d have a fit.’

They took a bus from Valladolid to Coca to see a 15th-century castle. Its pink turrets hovered like an ice-cream mirage over the plain. Wilf was enchanted. He talked Aggie into taking the tour. They were joined by middle-aged twin brothers from Manchester in identical sun-visors, belly-hugging T shirts and knee-length shorts. In a round tower room the guide encouraged them to whisper into the wall and test the acoustics. Wilf pressed his cheek to the cool surface.

‘Aggie’ he breathed. ‘Aggie’.

‘Wilf’ replied the wall. Wilf turned to see Aggie on the opposite side of the room, grinning at him over her shoulder. Then a new whisper circled the wall and escaped into his ear:

‘Did you bring the wet-wipes?’

One of the twins rolled exasperated eyes at the other.

‘Listen to him. Even nags me through the wall’.

The twins had a hire car and offered Wilf and Aggie a lift back.

‘No thanks’ said Aggie, ‘we’re chancing it’.

‘There’s only one bus a day’ warned one of the brothers. ‘You’ll be stuck if you can’t get a room’.

‘We’ll get one’ announced Aggie. ‘We’ll take the risk.’

‘Young love’ said one twin to the other, then turned to Wilf. ‘We were on a pilgrimage when we started off’ he said. ‘Only we sort of gave up.’

After they’d gone Wilf and Aggie ate in a bar and made enquiries. Sure enough one of the customers had a room for the night. It was bare and had no bulb in the light but it was all they needed. Wilf unrolled his sleeping bag on the floor while Aggie laid hers on the bed and sat on it, cross-legged and pensive. He didn’t like these preoccupied moods of hers. He made a bid for attention.

‘What was your favourite bit?’ he asked. Her eyes shifted from her thoughts to him.

‘What?’

‘Which bit did you like best? Of the castle?’

She dug her thumb and forefinger into the corners of her eyes and worked at them.

‘Did you hear what he said about the dungeon?’ she said at last.

Wilf didn’t answer. While he was still marvelling at the imposing architecture, Aggie was haunted by a reference to the prisoners dropped in through the ceiling and left with their broken bones to rot.

Wilf tried to think of a suitable reply, but everything that came to mind was so trite. Aggie suddenly shifted on the bed, leaned forward to drag her backpack from under it, and plunged her hand into one of its inside pockets. It re-emerged holding a small, mottled plastic sleeve. She bowed over it, curtained by her hair, and drew out a photograph. After staring at the picture for a moment she handed it to Wilf. Aggie, beaming, a little plumper in the face, with a shorter, neater haircut; strands of her hair blown in the breeze across her eyes; her hand frozen in the action of reaching up to sweep it away. Next to her, another woman, wearing a veil (hijab? half-veil), laughing or shouting, eyes wide and humorous. Aggie said,

‘That’s Naima. Hisham’s sister.’

Wilf said, politely,

‘Nice. Nice picture’.

Aggie said, ‘She’s dead’.

‘Oh!’ said Wilf. ‘I’m so sorry’. He looked up at her, but Aggie’s eyes were on the photo in his hand, not on him.

‘The Bay Bridge Bomb’ she explained.

‘Shit!’ said Wilf, and looked back at Naima’s animated face. He’d seen the front pages at the time, of course: their ranks of photographs, blurred or crisply posed or—like this one—snapped in mid-sentence, mid-laugh. All 16 victims: their names, their histories, their features—had filled the papers day after day. He’d probably seen Naima several times, along with the rest of the country. Was it four years ago? Must be five. He shook his head.

‘Shit …’

‘Yeah.’ Aggie nodded, and went on nodding. Wilf was beginning to get pins and needles in one of his legs, but he didn’t like to move. He had no idea what to say next. Eventually Aggie spoke again:

‘Hisham used to say, at least she went quickly. Not injured, you know … he reckoned that would have been the worst thing, for her …’

‘I see …’

Aggie pursed her lips.

‘I think’ she said ‘that’s a load of bollocks. Naima loved life.’

‘I can tell’ said Wilf, surreptitiously moving the weight from his numb leg. Aggie said,

‘Hisham never really got angry. You know? Which is weird, because Naima was the opposite. Real firebrand. Loved an argument’.

‘Same as you, then’ said Wilf. Aggie looked grateful.

‘We had some belters’ she said, exaggerating her Scottish accent. ‘Politics. Religion. Sex. Art. You name it. Nothing was off-limits. She was … great.’

Quietly, Wilf returned the photograph, and Aggie sat regarding it.

‘I even had a go at her about that veil’ she said at last. ‘Mainly to wind her up. And she said, listen, sister, you stick to your threads, I’ll stick to mine’.

If Aggie and Hisham had come together in grief, Wilf found himself wondering, would they eventually drift apart? He succumbed to the urge to rub his leg, pummelled it violently, to get the blood moving. Aggie was slipping the photo back into its cover, sliding it into the backpack pocket.

‘Anyway’, she said. ‘Just thought I’d show you, that’s all’.

‘Yes’ said Wilf, inadequately. ‘Thanks.’

The following day, before catching their bus back to town, they wandered around the local church. Four white tombs sat in ornate, immovable memory of the Fonsecas, for whom the castle was built. Wilf made a few notes and watched Aggie taking in the curls and twists of marble. He knew she was contrasting this insistent tribute with the nameless miscreants of the past, reduced to a freakshow footnote in the tourist guide’s patter. Only Aggie did justice to their wasted lives. Only Aggie reached down the centuries to guard their humanity. Wilf said her name and she looked up, surprised. But he didn’t know what he couild say. So he shook his head and shrugged and went back to his notes.

‘It’s funny’ says Gwennie. ‘I thought she’d be here by now. I hope she hasn’t got stuck somwhere. Transport is still so … iffy round here. More potatoes?’

Iffy, thinks Wilf. Is that a Gwennie Price sort of word? He wonders whether there’s a trace of some other life under the localised accent and the flowery housecoat. She’s already ladelling out a fresh dollop of mash, despite his protests, which are muffled by a mouthful of sausage.

‘One thing we never run short of here—’ says Gwennie, ‘potatoes. Tons of them on the allotments round town. Tons. Go on—there’s plenty to spare.’

And Wilf does pitch in, immediately. He hasn’t tasted such good food in years—maybe not ever. He glances at the newspaper propped against the condiment bottles. ‘Another Petrol Price-Hike. Home Office Denies Ration Plans’. Then he allows the buttery softness of the mash and the plump flavour of the sausages to draw him away from the headlines. These are stories from some other world—a world where two short weeks of petrol restrictions could bring the whole system to the brink of collapse. Goods lorries abandoned on the motorway. Food rotting in shops barricaded against looters. Truckloads of animals stalled en route to slaughter. Out there, thinks Wilf. Out in the cities and suburbs, the gentrified villages and market towns that have long since abandoned their stalls for the out-of-town malls. Not in Hestyn. Hestyn, shielded from the modern world by geography and rhododendrons, will ride any crisis, with its outlying dairies and pig farms and acres of spud-producing allotments.

Gwennie wanders to the french windows, still turning and folding the remainder of the mash in her bowl.

‘I’m sure she said she’d be here by six’. She gazes into her garden as if the new guest might pop out of the shrubbery. Wilf reluctantly swallows his mouthful and asks,

‘What’s her name?’

Gwennie shakes her head slowly, dreamily, and says,

‘Was it…? No … don’t remember… Head like a sieve, me. Wrote it down somewhere.’

Wilf still hasn’t written up his notes. There’s a text on his mobile from Paul, asking for a progress report. Wilf considers the evening’s options: scribbling away in his box room, or sitting in front of Gwennie’s telly, listening to her theories about the mystery guest’s whereabouts and waiting for the doorbell to ring. He decides to go for a stroll after supper. Clear his head. Then maybe he’ll get some work done.

Wilf can’t understand why it’s not darker here. He stands at the very end of the harbour wall and looks out across the silvered reeds of Hissing Marsh. There’s no moon tonight, as far as he can tell, but still the marsh and the harbour wall behind him hover in a spectral glow, almost as bright as daylight but without the solidity of shadow and shade. It must be the sea, thinks Wilf. That’s what it is. The sea makes everything strange. A surge of breeze unsettles the drowned sailors and provokes a crescendo of whispers. Wilf listens for names. He thinks of widows and mothers, anchored with grief, straining for the last sound, the last fragment of identity, before their husbands and sons merged with the sea and the sand. Faces on the sea floor; features opening, blossoming like flowers, drifting from their centre, floating free. Wilf isn’t sure, now he comes to think of it, whether these whispered names would be a comfort or a torment. Personally he finds it far easier to contemplate the loss of individuality. De-compose. A word of infinite consolation. He’s assaulted by a sudden retch of sorrow, which reaches his eyes and his throat before he masters it. He calms himself with the rhythm of this place, lets it lull away the droning in his ear. At this ghostly hour, the fraudulent harbour moves to its own pace, clearer and more consistent than it was among all the other business of the day. The marsh delivers its liturgy in waves, rising and falling, rising and falling. Beyond it, somewhere at the back of the mind, is the ocean’s heavier beat. As he stands there Wilf feels his own body succumbing to the relentless, ponderous pulse. His heart, the ebb and flow of blood in his veins, the slow pumping of his lungs—in, out, in, out … If he could stay here long enough, if he could root himself here, swaying with the universe, maybe he too would become part of another, magnificent, indifferent life.

Sooner or later he’ll have to go back. He’ll have to muster the energy to greet the new guest, if she’s arrived, back there in the ordinary darkness of the town. Another wave of whispers washes over him. He’ll stay a little longer. He can take his time; Gwennie’s given him a spare key. He’ll give the guest a chance to settle herself in her room. And tomorrow he’ll leave Hestyn and its spirits, and catch the early train. He’ll ring Paul and tell him it’s all under control, he’s got everything he needs, and he’s on his way to the next coastal town.

‘Winter’s on the way’ says Gwennie. ‘The mornings will be pitch black soon enough’.

‘Honestly, Gwennie, there was no need for you to get up. I could have grabbed something for myself—’

‘Grabbed something?’ Gwennie glowers at him and pats her neatly parted hair. ‘You can’t face the day on a mouthful of nothing. A good breakfast will keep you ticking over for hours on end’.

Wilf fidgets in his seat and takes another look through the open door into the hall, checking that his backpack’s still there, crammed and buckled and waiting to go. His insides gurgle.

‘There you are’ says Gwennie smugly. ‘I’ll be with you in half a mo’.

She returns to the kitchen and Wilf contemplates a quick getaway. He’s paid the bill; there’s nothing to stop him. Hoist the backpack, three strides to the front door, a shouted nicety and he’s away before she can fry the second egg. She can hardly chase him down the street, with the oven on and all. But the smell of bacon and eggs and brewing tea is mesmeric. Saliva swills around his mouth and his innards crunch. It won’t take long, will it, to down a plateful? And he can still be off in plenty of time for the train.

Gwennie enters with a trayload. It looks stupendous—almost unreal: smooth domes of egg-yolk above perfectly circular whites; crackling bacon rinds; tomatoes like fist-sized jewels; a side-plate of fluffy bread-and-butter … He can barely wait for her to set out the dishes. Before putting down the tray Gwennie nudges the door shut with her foot.

‘Good to get an early start’ she says, raising her voice to normal pitch. Until now they’ve both been using subdued morning voices. ‘Where did you say you’re off to next? Beaumont Beach, was it? Sad state that place is in nowadays. I remember when it was really glam. The Monte Carlo Casino, the Royal Hotel … Boarded up, now. Seedy. Very sad.’

She witters on while Wilf loses himself in the beauty of her cooking. Suddenly a touch of snideness intrudes.

‘Don’t know when Madam’s thinking of showing her face’ she says. ‘Eleven-thirty she turned up last night, did I tell you?’

‘Yes’. Barely half an hour before he’d got back from Hissing Marsh. Close shave.

‘Martha Crick, her name is.’

Martha Crick. Wilf’s manic chewing slows down. Aggie once commented that he had a music-hall name. And here’s another. Martha Crick. Faintly comic. A silent movie name. He likes it.

With conscious care he wipes a slick of tomato juice with his bread-and-butter. Then the doorbell rings. He and Gwennie jump with shock and his knife clangs across the table. Heading for the hall, Gwennie places a hand on her chest.

‘That gave me a start! Who on earth—at this hour!’

Wilf hears her open the door, then the questioning rise of her voice against the familiar stage-boom of Lambert Stokes.

‘Can Wilf come out to play?’

She’s fussing up the hall with him, explaining about Wilf’s imminent departure, and by the time Lambert’s at the breakfast room door his birdface is lengthened still further by disappointment.

‘Leaving?’ he echoes. He holds his stick at the usual dandy angle but the other hand is wedged sulkily into his pocket. ‘But we haven’t yet discovered a half of Hestyn’s secret pleasures!’

‘I hope you’re not suggesting anything smutty’ warns Gwennie Price, behind him, and Wilf finds this unaccountably funny. He nearly chokes on his bacon and egg. Something about the two of them, framed in the doorway like characters from a Rowlandson cartoon—Lambert with his beak and cane, Gwennie bunned and pinned and peering around his shoulder—something about them, and maybe something about Martha Crick’s name has lifted Wilf’s mood.

Gwennie says,

‘Well, if you can persuade him, Lambert … The room’s still free and I’m glad of the business. Have you had any breakfast?’

‘My usual, dear lady’.

‘Disgusting habit. Sit yourself down. You’ll have some tea and toast to take the taste away’.

Lambert drags a chair to Wilf’s table with a martyred air, and Gwennie leans through the doorway conspiratorially and explains,

‘This man has offal for his breakfast every day. Can you imagine?’ – before disappearing again into the kitchen.

’Good for the internal organs’ says Lambert, tragically. ‘Liver and kidney. Enriches the blood’.

Wilf actually feels guilty for leaving.

‘I’m sorry, Lambert’ he says, ‘but I’ve got a schedule. My train ticket lasts till the end of the month. If I don’t get the whole thing done by then I’ll be stranded.’

Lambert waves an elegant hand.

‘Ah, please, pay no heed to me. I realise that you have your own priorities. And long gone, I know, are the balmy days when one could trot into a rail station on a whim and make a spontaneous purchase. Still. I’ve so enjoyed having a companion who appreciates Hestyn’s cryptic corners’.

‘And I’m in your debt’ says Wilf ‘for all your expertise and knowledge… But surely we’ve exhausted the corners by now.’

‘No, no!’ Lambert’s back straightens and his eyes widen with hope.

‘As I said before, there’s many a treat still in store! Remember—we haven’t yet ventured to the upper or the lower floors of the Big House!’

Wilf’s fork stalls on its way to his mouth. Lambert presses his advantage.

‘No bare dereliction on those floors, I assure you—plenty to tease a man’s mind. You’ve seen our friends in the fresco—well, they are merely, as we might say, the advance guard. You cannot possibly do Hestyn justice without seeing the other floors!’

Crockery is clacking up the hall in time with Gwennie’s steps.

Wilf is still staring at his plate thoughtfully as she clinks to the table with the tea-tray.

‘Victory, Mrs P!’ cries Lambert, rubbing his hands. ‘I believe our young visitor will extend his booking after all!’

Gwennie pours his tea and the room thickens with its fruity, mud-rich scent.

‘Well,’ she says, without looking at either of them, ‘I must say, I’m very glad to hear it. He’s very welcome to stay here as long as he likes’.

The rhododendrons seem to have spread a little more since their last expedition. Wilf and Lambert puff and hack their slow way along, saying nothing. At this early hour the overgrown track is as cold and black as deep water, yet both men are sweating by the time they reach the park, and Wilf has taken off his jacket and tied it by the arms around his waist. No high wind fends them off this time, and as they stride across the grass the half-ruined wall looms up like a benevolent, sleeping creature.

‘Glorious’ shouts Lambert, as they reach the gate. The manor’s shells and buttons and encrustations are fiery in the morning light. Today it’s Wilf who leads the way up the drive. The door scrapes and snorts. They move from the briny outdoors into mellow dustiness that prickles their throats and nostrils. The fiddler is still tuning his violin, frowning with concentration; the singers loll on their balustrade, noting the intruders with bored eyes.

‘No time to waste’ declares Lambert, and Wilf follows to the main staircase. Though the steps are wide and shallow at the base, they become narrower and steeper as the flight curves round to the right. Wilf grabs the wooden bannister rail until, with a sweep of his cane, Lambert directs him to the other side of the stair, away from a gaping hole where three or four bannister rods have fallen away.

‘An accident perhaps, or the effects of fire’ comments Lambert, as they lean against the wall and contemplate the remaining stumps of turned wood. ‘But I fear it may be dry rot. I hope and pray not. If so the house itself may have vanished by the time its description graces your guide’.

Wilf realises with a lurch of anxiety that he hasn’t even remembered to bring his notebook. But after all, he reassures himself, he’s not likely to forget what he sees, and Lambert is always on hand to fill in the detail.

‘Onward and upward’ cries Lambert, and brandishes his stick to lead them around the final twist of stairway and onto the first-floor landing. From here Wilf can see the jutting rail of the minstrels’ gallery ahead, and the sheen of colours behind it, but no means of access.

‘More secrets’ says Lambert happily. He bounds forward, reaches up to the full extent of his long arm and fiddles with one of the plaster flowers that droop from the coving. There’s a clunk and the wall seems to relax; Lambert gives it a gentle push and a small door opens, set a foot above floor level and just large enough for an adult to squeeze through. Wilf peers through it onto the tiny gallery and out over the hall.

‘Not safe to go any further, I’m afraid’ warns Lambert. ‘Balcony floor’s a touch rickety. Can’t think anyone actually used it much, to tell the truth. No room there for real musicians’.

Further along, a wide corridor opens out to their left, lined with doors. From the landing the doors look solid and forbidding, but as Wilf and Lambert creak along the corridor they can see that some of the panels are splintering, some of the brass doorknobs missing, and one door, about halfway along, has a large gap where the wood has mouldered away. Wilf looks through it into a dull space of floorboards and bare plaster, with a small fireplace, a leather banquette covered in small eruptions of stuffing, and a window blanked by a grubby modern blind.

‘One of the guest rooms’ says Lambert. ‘Nothing much of interest in there’.

Wilf tries the handle of the next door, expecting it to be locked, but it swings open to reveal another, emptier room, also dimmed by a window-blind. He begins to feel cheated.

‘I thought you said “no bare dereliction”?’

Lambert wags a finger. ‘The best is yet to come’.

At the end of the corridor they turn right, into another passage, darker, colder and narrower. Their footsteps change in pitch and tone as they move from floorboards wisped with near-extinct carpet to bare stone. Wilf tells himself they must be running out of house by now. He turns for a last look at the guestroom doors before they lose sight of them, and assures himself that the doorknob turning of its own accord was a quirk of his imagination. When he looks back Lambert is changing direction again, into an opening on the left, and as Wilf catches up he sees another staircase, widening downwards and narrowing upwards into a recess that seems to lead to an attic.

‘Welcome to the servants’ domain’ says Lambert, flinging out his arms, and his voice bounces back from the stairwell. ‘Uncomfortable as you are in confined spaces, you may be relieved to know that we are leaving the servants’ sleeping quarters to their ghosts and descending instead into the engine-rooms of the aristocratic machine.’

As Wilf canters after him the walls retreat again, and the stairs deliver them into a cavernous area linking kitchen, housekeeper’s office, storage spaces and cellar access. There are glass-panelled doors and arched alcoves. Two bells and a nameplate —’Drawing Room’—cling to a panel on the wall among regimented lines of holes and broken hooks. From somewhere fresh air is washing through. Everything looks late-Victorian, functional, familiar—like a civil service office. There’s none of the eccentricity of the owner’s floors. Here, it could be business as usual. It could be a converted hotel, or a living museum. If a maid hurried out of the kitchen or a footman came marching up from the cellars, Wilf wouldn’t be at all surprised. Lambert beams at him, enjoying the expressions on his face.

‘It looks as if it’s still in use!’ Wilf says.

‘Even were the rest of the building to fall,’ says Lambert, ‘I wager this part would stand ready to supply and serve whichever new version might be thrown up in its place’.

Wilf says, ‘How come the downstairs is in such good nick?’

‘Such a fine, solid structure’ says Lambert. ‘Stands firm against weather and decay. You see, there really is no very good reason for Hestyn House to die. Mould, dry rot, these are worries, of course. But such matters can be rectified, given the will and the wealth. The will is my contribution; the wealth will flow from yours, from your guide and the public interest it will arouse’.

‘Honestly, Lambert, I think you’re overestimating the effects of this guide’ says Wilf.

‘Nonsense, dear boy. Think of Pevsner. Think of Cook. Good grief, think of Wainwright’s walks—hand-drawn and humble. A little canny targetting and—you know, people are in such need of distraction’.

Wilf sighs. Here we go again, he thinks. Why is everyone so keen to make him a spokesman, to load him with responsibilities he doesn’t want to bear? Roaming and reporting—that’s all Wilf is fit for. It’s not for him to take on the world’s ills, or even Hestyn’s. Leave that kind of thing to Aggie and her ilk. Lambert leans towards him.

‘More wonders still to come!’ he promises, then sets off towards the cellars, bellowing ‘Follow, follow!’

From his waistcoat pocket Lambert produces a heavy key and unlocks the cellar door. He pulls a hefty brass switch at the top of the cellar steps. From beneath their feet comes the throaty chug of a motor.

‘Generator’ explains Lambert. ‘Courtesy of the Hestyn House Conservation Society’.

A theatrical crescendo of light reveals high vaulting and massive pillars, picked out with shadow. Wilf says,

‘There’s a society? I thought it was just you’.

Lambert gives a dry cough and brushes past to lead the way down the steps. ‘In the main, yes, just myself’ he concedes. ‘But I have secured the services of Fred Tyler from time to time. Retired engineer. Works wonders with old lawnmower parts’.

They cross the wide cellar floor and pass through an archway into a second area, where one faulty light is twitching on and off. They reach a wooden door. Wilf looks back at the cellar as Lambert struggles with a bolt.

‘It’s very clean’ he remarks.

‘I’ve endeavoured to keep it that way’ says Lambert, ‘But actually it rather takes care of itself—’ He’s still tugging at the bolt; the metal grunts. ‘—unlike the rest of the place—’

BANG! The bolt rips thunderously free of its cradle and Lambert almost topples over backwards. He steadies himself, laughs feebly, and pushes the door open.

‘Voilà!’

He puffs his thin chest in triumph and Wilf reels back as if he’s been smacked in the face.

In the kitchen at Rosehill, Gwennie Price wipes the last of the breakfast dishes. Her second guest has gone out and she’s got the house to herself. Time to get everything in order and to plan the day. Gwennie likes to get everything in order. That’s one of her skills: the ability to slice great welters of time and event into manageable tasks, arrange them according to priority and deal with them one by one. This skill has served her well, steered her through the mayhem of parenthood, through widowhood and everything in between. She turns the radio on for company.

That was thinker and broadcaster Leslie Gooch with his Spiritual Snippet for the Day. Now here to discuss the relative merits of city and country life are writer Tess Young and journalist …

The announcer’s fruity tones subside into a comforting melody at the back of Gwennie’s mind, as she wipes and puts away each dish and cup in logical order. Big plates stacked at the back of the cupboard, small plates in front, cups and saucers on the shelf below. They click into place. Click. Click. She snaps the cupboard door shut, takes her dishcloth and wipes down the draining board and sink; wrings the cloth, folds it once, hangs it to dry over the dishrack. From another cupboard she takes a spray-bottle and a different cloth. Squirt, squirt on the worktop; wipe, wipe in broad, bold circles. A smell of sugared antiseptic fills the air and catches at her throat. She sprays and wipes the hob, fingering the cloth around lips and into crevices, seeking out stray crumbs and globules. She runs a couple of inches of hot water into the washing-up bowl and puts the second cloth in to soak, then puts the spray-bottle away. Behind it in the cupboard are ranks of other sprays, polishes, bottles of bleach, carpet-soap, stain-removers, cleaners for floors and basins, furniture and curtains, wood, stone, ceramic, plastic, metal. Gwennie has always stocked up well in advance.

She straightens up and smooths her apron in one quick, downward stroke, signalling the end of one round of chores. She surveys the kitchen and in her mind plans the meal she’ll prepare for her guests this evening. Pork chop, boiled potatoes, carrots. Maybe she’ll make an apple crumble. She allots an extra portion of the day for obtaining ingredients (Alf Tirrell the postman had a good crop of apples this year), and for cooking. Then she takes off her apron, hangs it on a hook on the door, and goes upstairs to start on the guest rooms. She wonders whether her new guest might like a full-length mirror. Women are fussier about these things than men. She noticed one in the attic when Wilf was passing her up all that clutter from the spare room: the old wooden-framed mirror that used to belong to her mother. Ugly, heavy old monster, but with a good dusting it’ll serve. Gwennie takes a pole from a corner of the landing and hooks one end of it to the attic door. As the door opens a metal staircase unfolds itself. She labours up the steps. Poor Mr Bromley, nearly did himself a mischief, heaving all those boxes up the attic steps and passing them up to her at the hatch. She felt a bit bad about that, but really, she couldn’t have managed them all on her own. She climbs into the attic and switches on the light, pausing to sigh at the townscape of crates and files and bags that—some day—will need sorting through. Buried in there somewhere are albums full of photographs—her son’s wedding, her daughter’s graduation, and other records of other lives that have passed through the house like a breeze. She stumbles and high-steps over them to reach the far end of the roofspace, where, sure enough, the mirror is lying on its side, propped against a long, wooden blanket-chest. Gwennie takes the frame in both hands and tests its weight. Maybe she’d better wait for Wilf to come back. She doesn’t want it crashing down those steps and ending up in smithereens. Seven years bad luck—no thanks. She’ll just haul it through this mess and get it into position by the hatch. Then she can pss it down the steps to Mr Bromley. Safer all round.

Gwennie eases the mirror away from the chest and starts the slow business of manoeuvring it, lengthwise, across the room. After a couple of moments she lets it rest on a plateau of sealed cardboard boxes and leans forward on her knees, breathing heavily. Presently she starts taking off her wristwatch, and turns back to the blanket-chest. There’s a smoke detector plugged into the wall behind it. Gwennie removes it, and uses the prong of her watch-strap to loosen the screws on its plastic casing. She jiggles the casing free, and from a cavity next to the batteries inside, takes a tiny key. She uses this to open the padlock on the chest. She lifts the lid of the chest and draws back two thick blankets. Packed tightly underneath are rifles, a confusion of batteries, wires and disembodied switches, and a canvas bag. Gwennie removes the bag, unbuckles it and takes out a thin rod, some pads and cloths, a pot of solvent and a bottle of oil. One by one she removes the guns, partially dismantles them and gives them a thorough clean, ramming the rod and cleaning pads into the barrels and finishing off with a brisk polish of the outer metal parts. Then she replaces them, as tenderly as a mother laying her baby in the cot. She covers the hoard, locks the chest and puts the key back in its hiding place. In two brisk movements she brushes one hand against the other—slap, slap—then returns to the awkward task of steering her mirror towards the attic door.

Hidden Gems chapters 17 to 18

2009-08-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

At first it’s hard to distinguish individual figures. Wilf’s impression is that he’s entering a crowd. He looks at the faces in the room. Grinning, grimacing, contorted, panting. Twisted around to boggle at him from the walls. Some are turned away: he sees profiles, intent and preoccupied, and the backs of heads. Swathes of faded, orangey-pink paint and blotches of deeper colour resolve themselves into new meaning. Wilf registers, at last, that most of these figures are naked, some partially dressed in the remnants of rich formality—a green cutaway coat, blue unbuttoned britches. Two or three of the figures are black. Suddenly the shock of recognition jolts Wilf’s whole body. He hears Lambert behind him, laughing in his throat.

‘Yes,’ says Lambert, ‘yes indeed’.

It’s taken a farcically long time for Wilf to realise what’s happening on these silent, clamorous walls. He begins to pick out details. A young boy—or perhaps a girl?— with curtains of red hair, bent forward on all fours, mounted by a bearded man, who shakes his fist and opens his mouth in a climactic bellow. Legs wrapped around a neck. Three men clamped parasitically onto a naked woman—one behind her, one at her breast, one between her legs. Her strangely impassive face gazing ahead, into the storeroom, into the future. Two familiar, golden-haired youths go about their business at the meeting of two walls; a broken violin lies at their feet, its strings overhanging the skirting board.

‘The minstrels’ says Wilf.

‘Making the most of their time off’ adds Lambert.

Wilf examines more details—fingers tweaking, hands grasping, tongues intruding—until faint arousal has subsided into faint nausea. His ear buzzes frantically in the silence. Then he starts to giggle, a strained, incredulous giggle, and he turns to Lambert, who’s blushing slightly, obviously pleased with the impact of his secret room.

‘Who did this?’ squeaks Wilf. ‘Your barmy Lord Lane? The harbour man?’

‘Not Caractacus’ says Lambert. ‘His grandson. Peregrine Lane. By his own hand.’

Wilf shivers. ‘So Gwennie was right’ he says. ‘Your secrets are smutty’.

Lambert places both hands on his walking stick and leans forward, scanning the walls.

‘It’s all history, dear boy. All part of the story. Can’t pretend it isn’t there.’

More detail catches Wilf’s eye. A painted cobweb in an upper corner; suspended from it, a spider, about to drop into the bulging cleavage of one of the few dressed women. A small, wizened figure disappearing under the same woman’s skirts.

‘So, what did he do, hide away in here after dark?’ asks Wilf. ‘Wasn’t he worried the servants would find out? Or didn’t it matter?’

‘Dear me, no! This was for public consumption. Up to a point.‘

Wilf looks at him in astonishment.

‘Oh, yes’ says Lambert, nodding his eagle head. ‘Back he came from the Grand Tour, you know, with all the requisite goodies for family viewing: Roman antiquities, fossils and skulls, ceramics and silks, splinters of the Holy Cross, icons and statuettes and … and then came the rest. Securely packed into sturdy tea-chests, we must imagine. Strictly for the boys.

‘The boys?’

Lambert pulls a long, preparatory breath through his nose.

‘Peregrine’s chums. The lads, you might say. Formed a little club. Called themselves The Sorcerers and Knowledge-Seekers. Not much record of their activities, but we can hazard a guess. Drink, drugs, gambling—almost goes without saying. And on special occasions, down to the storeroom for a viewing of the other artefacts. Those kept under lock and key’.

‘Foreign porn’.

‘Quite so. This was just the backdrop. There would have been drawings and figurines, implements … that sort of thing. Mentioned in a couple of letters I’ve rooted out. Referred to as “Perry’s Particulars”’.

Wilf narrows his eyes.

‘Lambert—have you got some of this stuff?’

Without moving his eyes from the scene on the walls, Lambert smiles a slow smile. ‘Patience, dear boy. Patience’.

‘Not that I’m—’ Wilf starts to giggle again.

‘Of course not. Of course not. It’s history, dear chap. As I said’.

Wilf suppresses his schoolboy hilarity and asks,

‘When was this? Eighteenth century?’

‘Well, Lord Peregrine was resident from 1771 to 1838.’

‘Same sort of time as the prisoner, then. John Auvrice.’

‘The prisoner, or the refugee’.

Wilf looks at the snarling, slavering face of a man bending over a complexity of limbs, and his stomach turns.

‘Ready to go?’ asks Lambert. ‘Dispiriting after a while, isn’t it? But before we leave—’

He moves to the storeroom door, which has stood open against one segment of the mural, and half shuts it to reveal two more male figures. Both are fully dressed. One is older, middle-aged, with a ridged, broken nose. He seems to be bald or thinning, but it’s hard to tell, as there’s a bandage wound tightly around his scalp. He wears a long, embroidered coat and one hand is raised, tentatively, towards the younger man, as if about to caress his face. The other man is avoiding his eye, looking away from him and from any observers in the room. He wears knee-britches, a waistcoat and a jacket, a soft-collared shirt whose cuffs bloom at the wrists. Everything about this figure is more carefully, more expertly, more tenderly painted than any other part of the room. The hands, relaxed at his side, are slim, smooth, sensitive. The face, framed by loose, chestnut-brown hair, is perfect. A triangle of mouth. Broad, high cheekbones. Most striking of all, the dark, deep, serious eyes, still gleaming with intelligence after 200 years. Wilf studies that face for several minutes, then asks, softly,

‘What are they doing here?’

‘Indeed’ says Lambert moving aside to let him out before shutting the door.

‘You’re early’ says Vic, as Wilf and Lambert lumber in to the Sunbeam Café. ‘Making the most of it before the rush?’

Wilf looks at his watch. He feels as if he’s been to a distant planet and back, but it’s only half past nine. He sits heavily. Their walk along the beach was magnificent: a clean, blustering breeze, a hearty smack of waves on solid sand, a vast sky tugging swathes of cloud. But it couldn’t sweep away those convulsed features and frantic hands. They’re still there, baying and bucking at the back of his mind.

‘Good sea day’ says Vic, bringing their frothy coffee. ‘Think it’ll hold?’

Lambert leans his walking stick against the wall and takes his coffee from Vic’s hand. ‘You never know, Victor, my boy. The climate hereabouts is almost as unreliable as the people’.

‘For shame, Mr Stokes’. Vic’s returning to his counter when he stops in his tracks. ‘Tell you what, gents—how about a fry-up? Just the weather for a full English, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I’ve already—’ starts Wilf, and is amazed to see Lambert sit forward eagerly, kneading his hands. Lambert orders sausage, eggs, bacon and beans, ‘and one of your splendid triangles of fatty bread, if you please’, then registers Wilf’s gaze and assumes an injured innocence. ‘One must refuel after a journey, old man. Go ahead—I recommend it’.

Wilf pats his belly in protest but — now he comes to think of it — he is a little peckish.

‘I can’t eat two cooked breakfasts in succession’ he insists. Vic is still hovering, sure of his prey. Lambert leans towards Wilf and murmurs,

‘Best thing, after an assault on the senses. Helps shift the hangover, as it were’.

Wilf’s stomach gives a tentative mew, and Lambert holds up a two-finger salute to their host. ‘Same again, please, Victor!’

For a few minutes they sit in silence while Vic clatters around with his frying pan. Then Wilf says,

‘What the hell should I write about that place?’

Lambert sighs.

‘As I said, it may be that we should keep that particular room hidden from the prying hordes.’

‘You certainly can’t have National Trust members trooping past all those—goings on. I mean, there might be children…’

‘Quite so. I thought perhaps restricted access. Application by letter only. Evidence of research interest required’.

‘Academics, you mean? Historians?’

Lambert gives an equivocal duck of the head. ‘Hmmm … I suppose that would be so restricted as to be virtually non-existent. We historians are an endagered species.’ Wilf nods. This was one of Aggie’s pet issues: the decline of taught history. Along with chemistry, politics, philosophy and theology, it’s fallen victim to a combination of cuts and the Direct Education Act’s Seditious Tendency clause. Aggie went on a couple of protests about it, but it didn’t seem to make any difference.

Lambert crosses his legs and ponders.

‘Maybe we should extend access to anyone over eighteen. What do you think?’

‘Might work’. Wilf pictures the house cleaned of graffiti and camp fires, creaking with polite visitors and helpful guides, shining with authentic 18th-century wall papers and polished wood. He adds a few costumed maids and copper kitchen utensils, and a small exhibition in the cellars: copies of the letters and deeds from Lambert’s collection; smudged Victorian photographs of the house falling into genteel ruin; family trees, fragments of broken stonework and rescued fabric … There they go, shuffling past the displays, peering through blue-framed reading glasses, veering into the second vaulted room for tea and fruitcake. Wilf imagines the customers stirring their tea and wiping stray raisins from their chins, ignoring the bolted wooden door at the far end of the room.

The smell of bacon fat moistens his tongue. Outside, a young woman hurries past with her coat collar turned up. Lambert says,

‘I’m sure it can be done. After all, that room was kept secure by generations of purportedly high-minded owners’. He winks.

‘How do you mean?’

‘No attempts seem to have been made to paint or plaster over Lord Peregrine’s work of art’.

‘So the Victorian fuddy-duddies indulged in a bit of naughty viewing themselves?’

‘One can only surmise’.

Wilf makes a mental note to contact Paul and revise the structure of the guide. More pages for Hestyn. Several spreads for the house alone. Full colour illustrations, tastefully cropped.

They emerge from the Sunbeam after two hours and stand on the pavement, braced against the salty air that tunnels down the street.

‘Where are the regulars?’ asks Wilf, and interrupts himself with a burp. He’s aware of his loaded stomach pulling at him like an impatient child.

‘Still a little early for them’ says Lambert, ‘but they’ll be along, you can depend on it’.

Wilf looks up the street. Fish and chip shop, closed. The Seaside Store, with a window display of bucket and spade, and striped bikinis stretched over cardboard torsos. Closed. The Bargain Basement, open and barricaded with plastic boxes, mops, laundry baskets, flowerpots and shopping trolleys. A newsagency, with a sorry-looking stand of postcards outside. Not a soul in sight. Wilf looks the other way, towards the seafront, and can just make out the corner of the boarded-up donut stall. That’s the way the woman went, the woman who passed the Sunbeam a couple of hours back. Where was she going? A discarded cigarette pack skids past the end of the street.

Wilf doesn’t know where to go next.

‘What do people do around here?’ he asks, as if his own life were a social whirl.

Lambert nods at the bare street.

‘Other than delving into past erotica, you mean? Well … ‘ He leans on his stick into another rush of wind. ‘There must have been a time when Hestyn was connected to the world. I believe my aunt was a great surfer of the web’.

Coming from Lambert, the phrase sounds archaic. ‘But by the time I arrived all that was being shut down, of course’.

‘You’ve never applied for a net permit? I’d have thought you’d find it invaluable for your research’.

The two men start walking, for no apparent reason, across the street and towards the newsagents. Lambert says,

‘All that bother about producing credentials and testimonials and what-have-you … Far easier to rely on the good old public library’.

Not very convincing, muses Wilf. Maybe Lambert Stokes has some reason to avoid the vetting procedures. But in his overfed stupour he finds it hard to muster any more questions. Besides, he knows it doesn’t take much to disqualify an applicant. Membership of a vaguely troublesome union, a bolshy letter to The Times, attendance at a rally camcorded by the police … Wilf himself has let his first permit lapse without applying for renewal. Aggie never bothered in the first place.

They stroll away from the sea, and pause at the postcard stand. Wilf fingers the pictures of anonymous coastline. Their corners have softened and the colours are gradually seeping into abstract splashes of beige and blue. Wilf decides to send a card to Paul, and fishes in his pocket for cash. In the gloom of the shop he can just make out a shopkeeper hunched over the counter, flanked by pale blocks of newspaper.

‘I’ll buy a few’ he says, taking the cards from the stand. ‘That ought to make his day.’

‘I’ll wait here’ says Lambert.

Wilf enters the shop. The shopkeeper gives no sign of acknowledgement. Even now Wilf can see little more than an outline of curly hair and bent shoulders. Only Lambert, framed in a rectantle of light through the door, is clearly visible. Wilf moves nearer the counter. The shopkeeper is leaning on his elbows, reading a magazine. He doesn’t look up. Wilf pretends to browse. There’s a wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves, half-empty. The seedy magazines are at eye-level, the car mags, needlework patterns, TV listings and fashion glossies on the shelf below. No computer magazines, since the ban. One of the items taken from Aggie’s flat was a copy of Tekkie, where subversives were said to swap tips on breaking through domain barriers. At ankle-height are the national papers and the Coastal Clarion. Wilf stoops to read its main headline: Coast Road Buses Are Back! Southport to Beaumont route to reopen after seven years. There’s a rack of cards: happy birthday, happy anniversary, congratulations, deepest sympathies; and a row of cut-price CDs: Bing Crosby, Sounds of the Sixties, The Golden Age of Swing. Wilf tries approaching the counter again. Its glass front is cracked and sellotaped along its length. Behind it is a ramshackle display of Hallowe’en masks. The newspapers piled to each side of the shopkeeper are all copies of the Clarion. Wilf clears his throat and the shopkeeper, still absorbed in his magazine, extends a slow hand. For an instant his eyes shoot from page to cards. He speaks through the fingers of the hand supporting his chin:

‘Five pound’.

Wilf puts the money into the hand, which closes around it like a flytrap, making the fiver rustle.

‘Ta’.

Outside, the wind drums the Bargain Basement’s boxes. It sidles halfway into the shop and agitates the papers and the bead curtain behind the shopkeeper. Wilf catches sight of a fire-door between the beads.

He returns to Lambert, dealing through the postcards and wondering who in hell he can send them to. Paul, his sister … who else does he know? As he blinks back into daylight Lambert asks,

‘How many did you buy?’

‘Five’ says Wilf, and though he studiously avoids checking, he’s aware that Lambert’s eyes are crinkling in recognition. There was a campaign recently, set in train by students to highlight the increase in state power. Buy five postcards, write on each one your name, address and number and send them to a friend, a relative, your MP, your local hospital and a newspaper. The idea was that, in the event of sudden disappearance, incarceration or unexplained injuries, you had a ready-made support group to pester the authorities on your behalf. It was just a stunt, but it caught on for a while. Aggie did it, of course. Wilf still has the card she wrote him in her quick, jagged hand. Funny, really, thinks Wilf, that he should buy these now, wasting five quid on postcards he’ll never send. He tells himself it’s a sort of tribute to Aggie. An apology.

Lambert and Wilf amble on up the street, away from the sea. The tacky shopfronts peter out. The buildings towards the far end of the street are brooding and introspective: a square, stern-walled Methodist church; a single-storey block with peeling plaster, a rusty corrugated-iron roof and a noticeboard next to the door headed ‘Community Hall’. The only notice is a reminder to residents not to let their dogs foul the pavements. On the opposite side, another low building, with metal-shuttered windows and Liberal Club 1926 engraved into the stone lintel. Finally, a stark, granite-faced building on the corner with a short flight of steps leading to barred double doors. Empty fag packets, newpaper pages and husks of broken plastic form a dune against the steps. There are no windows or identifying features. At this point the street butts into a wide, unmarked road edged with stretches of scrubby grass and hedging and, here and there, sprawls of bungalow and dwarf conifer. They stop here and Lambert indicates the granite building.

‘Once upon a time, believe it or not,’ he says ‘this was a variety theatre’.

Wilf pulls a sceptical face. ‘Doesn’t look much like a theatre to me’.

‘No, indeed. It has since served as a cinema and a bingo hall, and more recently as a nightclub’.

‘A nightclub? Where did the clubbers come from?’

‘They didn’t. As shortlived a venture as all the rest’.

‘And now?’

‘Now—nothing. Left to decay, as was the Big House.’ Lambert is shielding his eyes from the glare, looking up the wide road in expectation. He adds, absently,

‘Hideous. Looks like a detention centre’. Then his voice expands into avuncular heartiness. ‘Right! Let’s see who’s the first to spot the approaching stampede’.

Wilf squints up the road with Lambert.

‘What are we looking for?’

‘Ha-ha!’ cries Lambert, his arm flying up. ‘I see them! The prize is mine!’

At the farthest reach of Wilf’s vision a movement disturbs the sky. With the next gust of wind he catches a distant wittering, indistinguishable at first from the calls of the gulls, but separating into human voices as the movement resolves itself into a hobble of people.

‘Here they come!’ booms Lambert. ‘Right on time!’

From the other direction they hear an answering babble and Wilf swings round to see more residents bustling along towards the junction with the high street. He recognises Millie and her tartan shopping trolley, and a couple of other Sunbeam customers. Old men in caps, with ridged cheeks the colour of wood; women in scarves and buttoned-up macks, cawing to each other under cloudy hair. Lambert begins to dole out greetings as the advance guard draws near. Some of the men give Wilf a wary nod.

‘Where do they all come from?’ asks Wilf.

‘They live here, old boy! These’ —Lambert flaps a hand towards the bungalows—’go on for many miles! Morning, Maureen! George, my dear chap, how’s the leg?’

The regulars stream down the main street, their chatter billowing and diminishing with the play of the wind. Past the Bargain Basement and the newsagents, past the Seaside Shop and the fish ‘n’ chip shop and into the Sunbeam Café with a clatter of the door. A few stragglers slow their pace and dawdle in the logjam outside.

Wilf says,

‘They’ll never fit in. They must be going straight through and out the other side’.

Lambert laughs.

‘Far from it, dear fellow. It’s remarkable how readily human beings can squeeze into a tight space. As you’ve discovered for yourself’.

One by one the Sunbeam sucks in the regulars and their din, until the street is left to itself and the stuttering plastic crates once more.

Lambert touches Wilf’s elbow.

‘Shall we strike out into open country?’

Wilf looks about him in confusion. The main street to the seafront and the wide road of bungalows seem to shut in the landscape. It doesn’t seem possible to break their boundaries.

‘Come on’ says Lambert, as if he’s summoning a dog, and his walking stick takes a long stride across the road. Wilf casts one vaguely regretful glance back to the safety of the sea, then trots after him. Lambert marches straight into the middle of the opposite hedge, which gulps him in through a gap camouflaged with straggly growth. Wilf follows and, on the other side, treads on the edge of something solid in the mud. It’s a half-submerged sign: ‘Public Footpath’. Ahead of him a trail of footprints marks out the route across a grassy field. He slithers, regains his balance and struggles on. A few crouching trees line the edge of the field, their branches frozen permanently in the direction of the ocean gales. He concentrates on keeping his footing and keeping Lambert in view. Involuntary snapshots burst behind his eyes: a slavering mouth; a clawing hand. A hidden room. He thinks of the tower, its secret passage, then of the windowless granite building. He tries to quicken his pace.

Lambert is bellowing something and waving his stick. Wilf hears the word ‘summit’. He catches him up at a wire fence, interrupted by a stile. From here the view opens onto a mildly undulating stretch of coarse coastal grass, whose death-rattle fills the air. About a mile further on the ground levels off in a straight line, as if the top of a hill has been lopped off. The upper edge of some man-made structure can be seen above it.

‘Better see to your footwear’ advises Lambert, jabbing his stick at the thick coating of mud on Wilf’s shoes. ‘And then it’s Ho for the church!’

Wilf bends to find a sharp stone and scrape the mud away, then straightens swiftly, grasping his belly, as his innards threaten to implode.

‘That’ll soon pass’ says Lambert. ‘a bracing walk is the best way to keep one’s intestines at work, I find’.

‘I can’t believe’ says Wilf ‘I’ve eaten two cooked breakfasts in succession’.

‘It’s the sea air’ says Lambert. ‘And by the time we’ve completed our stomp ;you’ll be ready for one of Gwennie’s nourishing feasts, I’ll warrant’.

Wilf subdues the urge to vomit with a mighty effort of will. Lambert leans on the stile. ‘There’ll be a slap-up…’ he begins, then turns aside, letting the rest of his sentence fly away.

Hidden Gems chapters 19 to 27

2009-08-01T09:45:00.000-07:00

After the Spanish trip Wilf returned home with a heavier heart than ever. His front door wedged itself against a dam of bills, catalogues, offers and free papers. When he finally managed to squeeze inside he found a small mound of his clothes on the living room floor, where he’d discarded them in a last-minute re-pack. The usual chill of desertion had settled around the house. In the corner the answerphone flashed its remonstration. Wilf pressed ‘play’.

‘Hi, Wilf, me old china. Paul. Just to say welcome back, and don’t forget I need your disk on the fifth and not an hour later.’

A message from his sister in Stockholm.

A machine telling his machine that he might have won a timeshare in the sun.

No message from Aggie this time. She’d gone her own way, sprinting to catch her train at Victoria, hurrying back to Hisham. He couldn’t follow her any further. Wilf still had the scent of her in his nostrils, still held the rise and fall of her voice in his head. Still, he consoled himself, there’d be another joint trip, when Paul’s next commission came along. Maybe Wilf could spend the rest of his life that way, travelling with Aggie, keeping an eye on her, sharing everything with her except himself. Maybe that would be enough.

He let his backpack thump to the floor and picked up one of the free papers at random and looked at the headline without interest.

‘”Disappearances may be linked to alien sightings”—Security Minister’. He turned the page to a huge picture of a woman’s bleached face. ‘Reverse the ageing process in only two days!’ As he threw the paper back to the floor the phone rang and he pounced.

‘Hi Wilf’ said Paul, repeating the exact intonation of his recording. ‘Glad you’re back. Come in and tell me all about it. And then knuckle down and write it all up, there’s a good lad. Then we can talk about France’.

The France trip was different from the beginning. Wilf had arranged to set off with Aggie from London, but she called on the eve of their departure. She had some stuff to sort out, she said. She’d meet him a day later than planned. She sounded distant, sullen, even. Wilf said,

‘That’s OK—I’ll change the tickets.’

‘No, don’t’ she said. ‘You go ahead. I’ve just got to see someone first, that’s all’.

‘Who?’ asked Wilf, disconcerted.

There was a short silence, then she said, ‘Hisham. It’s nothing major. I’ll see you in a couple of days’.

They met outside the Musée d’Orsay. Wilf was early. He watched the bunchings and trails of people, the couples and families and faster-striding individuals, relishing the fact that one of them, soon, would be Aggie. It had been raining, but the sun was out now. Drops and rivulets shook away from coats and closed umbrellas and flashed in the light. They had weeks of travel ahead. Wilf was happy. But as soon as he spotted her he could tell—from the angle of her face, the rhythm of her stride—that something was wrong.

‘Bonjewer’ he said, and immediately wished he hadn’t. She refused to meet his eye. She said,

‘Did you find a good place to stay?’

She shifted the weight of her rucksack. She looked so small under it, like a tortoise with an outsize shell, but when Wilf reached out to take it from her she took two unsteady paces away and snapped:

‘I can manage’.

There was no joy in Wilf’s writing this time. He gave up asking Aggie questions, or trying to engage her interest, after a couple of days. From then on, when they spoke it was only to discuss timetables or meals or other logistics. She wanted to split the itinerary between them. She said it would speed things up if they parted ways for three days, taking a different string of towns and train routes each. Wilf refused.

‘Paul’ he said ‘would sack me if I let you go off alone’.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ she snapped, ‘I’m not a child. I don’t need a guardian’.

Wilf shook his head. ‘Sorry. You’re stuck with me’.

She folded her arms and glared in another direction.

At Narbonne they went to a museum. Aggie was impatient and fidgety and—partly as a counterbalance, partly to provoke her even more—Wilf took his time, lingering to read every label and muse over every exhibit. Each gallery had its own curator—sitting in a corner, standing, strolling about. Each curator greeted everyone who passed through—’Bonjour, ‘sieur’, ‘bonjour, ‘dame’—as the visitors landed momentarily at each display before fluttering on to the next. But Wilf refused to be rushed. He refused to succumb even to Aggie, who dawdled behind him, scuffing her feet like a child. He was determined to absorb the museum’s tranquility and mull over every item, conjuring its previous life, when it had been merely a comb or a pin or a thimble, too commonplace to deserve such rapt attention. He stood before a 10-foot board covered in jigsaw fragments of Roman wall-paintings and later layers of 15th-century hunting scenes. Behind him, Aggie ruffled the air.

‘Museums! What’s this got to do with anything? Chunks of old plaster and bits of old tat in a glass case—is that what we’re telling our readers about?’

A curator padded behind them like a prison guard in the visiting room. Wilf waited for him to pass before answering:

‘I thought you were interested in history’.

‘Yes, but not this! Aggie bit her words and chopped the air with her hand. ‘Not scraps of crap, all arranged in a line to make the tourists feel cultivated. What’s this got to do with the real past of real people?’ Seeing Wilf’s embarrassment, she deliberately turned up the volume. ‘Everyone creeping about in this reverential way, as if we’re in church, or something—I mean, why? There’s nothing mystical or admirable about the past. It’s the overworked and undernourished, struggling to get from one day to the next, and a handful of lucky sods with pretty beads, and, and jewel-encrusted daggers…’

A child stopped to marvel at Aggie’s rant and was dragged away by her mother. Wilf moved on and tried to concentrate on displays of Roman graffiti and medieval church paintings. Scrawled records of sexual conquests and jokes and curses and identities. A host of painted angels raising their hands to God. Aggie went on grumbling and Wilf went on studying the scratched names and daubed thumbprints of the dead. After a while he became aware of a new calm, and turned to see that Aggie had gone.

‘Oh, shit’, said Wilf, for the umpteenth time. He paced the platform again. ‘Oh, shit, shit, shit’. Paul, he told himself, is going to kill me. He swivelled round for another length. They were meant to be moving on, catching a late afternoon train to Perpignan. When he scoured the streets outside the musem without luck, Wilf banked on her being at the station. The train rumbled in early. He usually loved this moment—admiring the engine, somehow so much more authoritative and impressive than any British train; taking his seat and noting the decor, the passengers, the sounds and smells before another new journey began. Not today.

He took his phone out again and rang her number. No reply. He started to dial Paul’s number, then changed his mind. She’ll get here, he told himself. She’d never miss a train.

The carriage was nearly empty but he sat at the first seat he reached, opposite a woman with a sky-blue scarf tied over her hair. He saw the way she gathered herself together, ready to move if necessary. Every few seconds he was back on his feet, pretending to check something in his backpack, then pressing his cheek against the window to scan the whole length of platform. The woman opposite shifted in her seat. He sat down again, folded his arms and dropped his chin onto his chest. What if Aggie didn’t turn up? Of course she’d turn up. She’d catch a later train. He’d wait for her at Perpignan. Problem solved. And if not … Wilf raised his head and realised from the scarfed woman’s expression that he must be wearing a wild look. He closed his eyes. Of course Aggie would turn up. He’d given her no reason to run away.

A voice near his ear made him yelp. A high-pitched, comedy-mockney voice:

‘Mind if I sit ‘ere, mister?’

Aggie unholstered her rucksack, propped it in the aisle and flung herself onto the seat next to his, sending up a small tornado of dust and crumbs. The blue scarf woman lost her patience, got up fussily and made her way further down the carriage.

‘God’, said Aggie, ‘I’m boiling’.

She was leaning against him, her spidery hair tickling his neck. Wilf wanted to ask her where she’d been but was afraid of damaging this precious new mood. She began to chatter, complaining about the heat, about their tame commissions—’Europe!’ she squawked, flapping her hands to shoo the continent away, ‘Could you get any safer?’

‘Nothing wrong with safe’ ventured Wilf. ‘Safe is what tourists want—’

‘Tourists!’ She hurled himself at him again, knocking him against the window. He caught sight of the scarf woman in the parallel glass world, sitting tightlipped four seats down.

‘We’re not writing for tourists. We’re writing for travellers. They don’t want intercity services and hot and cold running water. They want what we keep promising. Cutting edge’.

‘You said every place on earth had a cutting edge’ Wilf reminded her, ecstatically.

‘I don’t remember saying that’.

‘I do’.

She raised her eyebrows.

‘Do you remember everything I say?’

She was flirting. Wasn’t she? Wilf was sure this was flirting.

‘Burma’ she announced. ‘That’s where we should go’.

We.

‘Or the Congo. Or—’

‘There’s a limit to how far we can physically travel’ said Wilf, ‘given the borders and the—’

She was staring at him now. As his words petered out she said,

‘I’m not seeing Hisham any more’.

Wilf felt the blush begin somewhere around his belly and rush up his chest and shoulders, neck and face.

‘We had a long talk’, said Aggie. ‘After the Spanish trip’.

Wilf’s hands were locked into fists on his lap. Don’t assume anything, he warned himself. Don’t hope. It might be a trap.

Aggie looked past him through the window. The train was mustering its strength and moving off. People on the platform glided past, holding up goodbye hands or turning, adjusting, preparing to go.

‘Thing is’ said Aggie, ‘we were sort of thrown together, after Naima’.

The train was gathering speed, finding its rhythm. Aggie said,

‘That’s what the bomb did, see. Blew us together’—she smacked her hands once—’then sucked us apart’. She looked straight into Wilf’s eyes. ‘We needed each other for a while. Not now’.

Wilf’s neck was stiff. His head twitched.

‘Now’, Aggie went on, ‘it’s not enough. Naima’s not enough. To hold us together’.

‘So it was … amicable?’ asked Wilf, with difficulty. His tongue stuck like velcro to his palate.

Aggie reached up with her right arm, looped it casually, balletically, around the back of his head, and drew him down to kiss him. He allowed himself to respond only after seeing her quick, preparatory lizard-lick of her lips. He closed his eyes and thought: you won’t get away from me now.

‘You’re spoilt, Paul, that’s your trouble. We all are. Spoilt by all this’.

Aggie tossed her head to indicate their surroundings, then mimed apology at the waitress who started towards their table. Paul inhaled dramatically and gave his Grande americano a languid stir.

‘You’re probably right’ he said. ‘And long may it last’.

A waft of roasting coffee mellowed the conversations in the café’s vaulted spaces.

‘But that’s the point’ Aggie insisted. ‘It won’t last. It’s more fragile than you think’.

‘Cities crumble, empires fall’ agreed Paul. ‘And tourists keep on trucking, bless their deck-shoes.’

Aggie’s head lolled back in exasperation.

‘I thought Cutting Edge guides weren’t for tourists’.

Wilf laid a hand on her thigh and saw, from a minimal shifting of Paul’s eyelids, that the gesture had been noted.

‘You can’t carry on’ said Aggie ‘doing Cutting Edge France, Cutting Edge Spain, Cutting Edge Bloody Benelux—’

‘Benelux!’ said Paul. ‘Now, there’s an idea!’

‘These aren’t Cutting Edge guides. They’re Comfort Zone guides. It’s a joke’.

Paul pouted.

‘People are buying them, Ags. That makes them deadly serious’.

Aggie twisted away, jerking her leg free of Wilf’s hand.

‘If it’s all about sales’ she said ‘we might as well go back to the usual old pap. In fact I’m not so sure we ever left it’.

‘Listen’ said Paul, suddenly clipped and stern. ‘The war’s creeping closer all the time. There are only so many places we can go. And if we can’t go there, neither can the masses, however intrepid they may be.’

Aggie was resting her feet on the bar between her chairlegs now, propping her knees against the table. She never could sit still or arrange herself conventionally on a chair.

‘The Discomfort Zone is still a zone of buffer states’ she protested. ‘Yes, I know they might go up at any minute but then let’s make the most of them! Nobody else is doing it—think of it as a niche!’

There was a pause. Aggie’s left knee jiggled up and down compulsively. She picked at her fingernails. Paul looked from her to Wilf and widened his eyes.

‘So I take it you two are a permanent team now?’

Wilf couldn’t resist a smug beam, but Aggie ignored the question and muttered:

‘Before we know it we’ll be dragged into the war and that’ll be it. End of travel, end of café culture, end of everything. We’ll all be at each other’s throats.’

Wilf touched her elbow, willing her to acknowledge their intimacy.

‘We’ll never be at each other’s throats’ he said.

Paul groaned. ‘Oh, please, you two’.

Aggie turned to Wilf, her whole body taut and earnest.

‘But, Wilf, that’s the point. We will. If push comes to shove—that’s how it goes. People turn on their friends, their neighbours, their parents—’

(Say ‘lovers’ thought Wilf. Say it.)

‘—if it’s life or death, really life or death, we’re all savages. That’s the truth of it.’

‘Not the only truth’ said Paul, smoothly. He was examining a loose button on his cuff. ‘There are heroes as well as villains in life, you know. And we’re all on the same side. Aren’t we?’

‘We’d find excuses not to be’ said Aggie. ‘It’s like football teams. Them and us. Any excuse to hate’.

‘Why would we hate each other?’ whined Wilf. He wanted her to stop. He hated that look of veiled triumph on Paul’s face. Stop playing the firebrand, he thought at her. Stop proving his point.

‘I don’t know why we’d hate each other—because I’m Scottish, because Paul’s black, because, because you’re called Wilf—whatever!’

Immediately she was seized with guilt and extended a conciliatory hand to touch his face.

‘Whatever’ she repeated, smiling at him.

Paul said, ‘To return to the matter at hand, where exactly did you have in mind?’

Aggied snatched her hand back and focused on Paul again, rattling off her list of countries on high alert. Paul raised his palms against the roll-call, capitulating.

‘All right, all right. We’ll talk about it’.

One of his lifted hands slid easily into a summons, and the waitress veered towards them again.

‘More coffee for everyone’ said Paul, ‘while civilisation survives’.

Aggie moved to scratch her arm and Wilf returned to his present self. He didn’t know how long he’d been in his reverie, floating in a layer of infinity above and beyond this place. Now he too adjusted his position, tightened his arms around her, shuffled his buttocks on the uneven stone. They were on the upper tier of the ruined amphitheatre, looking out through a haze of heat and muck over the city’s wavering planes and blocks. Aggie was resting against his chest, using him as her armchair, and had drawn her knees up to reveal the brown calves under her baggy trousers. This is it, thought Wilf. This is what it’s all been for—the pretending and the panicking, the watching and the guessing. This is the defining moment of my life. He closed his eyes to the sun but retained the image of her legs, of the tiny, soft hairs and the fine crackling that had started to break the skin’s surface. If they stayed here long enough they would harden, petrify, become part of the site, a tourist attraction for future generations. And on your left, ladies and gentlement, the couple who turned to stone. Wilf already felt removed from the life around him, the guide’s commentary, the stumbling and murmuring of visitors, the hum and blare of traffic far below. Remaining here forever, keeping Aggie close and safe, seemed a distinct possibility until he became aware of the first pleasant purrs of hunger drawing him back into plans and intentions. Sooner or later they’d get to their feet, he’d lose the extra warmth of her body, they’d pick their way back across the site and return to the roar of streets and stalls, find somewhere to eat, go back to their rooftop. Wilf hadn’t expected to love this land. War had already touched its edges, but here in the city, and through most of the country, everything functioned much the same, affecting not to notice. He was smitten with it all—the desert, the ruins, the frantic, fuming towns and the spicy roadside snacks, the nights on a concrete hotel roof, under headlight-smeared skies. Aggie sighed and said something. He dipped his head to hear, without opening his eyes.

‘Empires fall’ she said ‘and cities crumble. I bet they never thought it would end—the people who sat here when it was new’.

Sharply she straightened, breaking his embrace.

‘Oh, Aggie’, he moaned, ‘not yet. A few minutes more…’

‘This is ridiculous’ she muttered. She was swivelling around, getting ready to go. ‘Here we are, finally in the thick of things, and look at us! Still slouching around with the coach parties, admiring the views. We might as well be in the Lake District.’

‘Well, what do you want to do?’ said Wilf. She was up and balancing on one foot, smacking her sandal against the ancient stone and slapping dirt from the sole of her foot. Wilf said again,

‘What do you want to do, Aggie? We’ve got the edgy destination. We’re doing the route you chose. Let’s leave it at that. We can’t help it if the war hasn’t caught us up.’

She aimed a look of rage at him over her shoulder.

‘Don’t be obscene. You think I want the war to spread?’

Wilf couldn’t answer. He could hardly say what he thought—I’m not quite sure. Aggie returned to the business of leaving, and added:

‘I just think we’re too soft, that’s all. Too used to the special treatment.’

‘We’re sleeping on a roof’ offered Wilf. ‘That’s not special treatment’.

‘Only because it’s cheaper. Not because we have to. For us it’s a treat’.

Wilf bridled with pleasure. He watched her scrape her hands through her hair and force it back into a stumpy ponytail, looping a ring of elastic rapidly around and around. He waited to bring her back, to find the correct response. Weakly, he tried a new tack:

‘Do you want to change the itinerary, then?’

She spun to face him, her face clear and eager again, her hands reaching for his.

‘Don’t you reckon? Not much, I mean, we’ll still follow the basic route. Just wander off the main trail for a bit. See what’s going on. Towards the border. See what it’s like’.

Wilf took her hands and let her pull him to his feet. Keep her happy, he thought. Play along and keep the rest of the day safe. By tomorrow she might have changed her mind.

An empty hut. Mountains tearing an orange sky. The smell of scorched dust and human sweat. The first heaviness of heat was beginning to press down the cooler dawn. They’d wasted time, good travelling time, and soon it would be too hot to make progress. Aggie was furious. They stood outside the shepherd’s hut, where they’d bedded down the previous night on a hard earth floor. Their backpacks were propped against the hut wall, Wilf’s pack spurting towels. The land around them was wide and still and quiet. The only movement for miles around was Aggie’s flailing arms, the only sound her voice.

‘We might never have this chance again’ she was saying.

‘You don’t have to shout’ said Wilf, though his own words were amplified in the silence.

‘Wilf,’ she said, ‘look at that road. Look at it. There’s nothing there. no one. Look.’

She took two long, deliberate paces backwards, and declared:

‘I am now on the border. One more step and I’m in the Discomfort Zone. I haven’t been struck by lightning. I haven’t been shot. I haven’t even been asked for my passport. THERE IS NOONE HERE’.

‘That’ said Wilf ‘is the whole point. Noone else comes here. They wouldn’t be mad enough. It’s empty now, but you never know what’s going to rumble round that corner any minute’.

He squinted towards the horizon as if the sentence might summon a truck bristling with weaponry.

‘It’s just a road’ said Aggie. ‘You’d have to walk eight miles through the desert to get to any real fighting’.

Wilf said, ‘In that case there’s not much point in going any further, is there?’

She gave a cough of exasperation. ‘Wilf, we’re meant to be telling people the truth. Warts and all. We can’t do that by shuffling round the edges of unpleasantness, then hightailing it back to a four-star hotel’.

‘A four-star—!’ Wilf croaked with indignation. He could feel the skin dragging at his eyes and the stubble dragging at his cheeks. He could feel last night’s hard earth and Aggie’s hard voice pressing against his skull.

‘I just stayed the night in a bloody shack’ he said. ‘I’m now standing on the verges of war, in full view of any passing sniper, on some god-forsaken track in the middle of nowhere, because you insist on ditching a perfectly good itinerary and going walkabout. You can’t accuse me of settling for the easy life’.

She stared at him. She tucked those flyaway hands into the pockets of her jeans. She was standing with her legs slightly apart, like a soldier, a gangster. She was wearing her padded waistcoat, with all its zips and pockets, despite the crescendo of heat, and her battered old walking boots, barely contained by the frayed and straining laces. Her hair was trying to free itself from its elastic band. Wilf wanted to go up to her, put his arms around her, kiss her ear and her neck, give in to her again, follow where she led him. But Wilf was scared. Truly scared. He really did see the distant flowering of dust, really heard the grumble of wheels, felt the hatred of approaching enemies. His throat locked, his gut loosened, his muscles shivered with the effort not to run and hide. He might throw up, or cry.

Aggie said, ‘You agreed to come’.

She spoke more calmly, but her words still rang across the void. ‘I didn’t force you. You agreed’.

‘I gave in’ he corrected. ‘Just like I’ve given in on everything so far.’

‘But not this time?’

‘Not this time. I’m a travel writer, Aggie. A guide-writer. I’m not a foreign correspondent. I’m not a hero or—I just travel. I write. That’s all.’

‘About the pretty things’ she sneered.

‘No… No. That’s not fair. I do try and tell the truth. It’s just … the truth isn’t always black and white. It’s complicated. There are two sides to…’

A slight jerk of her head indicated her scorn. He struggled on:

‘You have to draw the line. Entering a war zone is where we draw the line.’

For a moment they stood there in silence like a couple of gunfighters. Suddenly Aggie walked towards him, right up to him, almost touching. Automatically he lifted his arms to embrace her, but something in her stance made him stop. She said,

‘People are dying. Children. Crushed in their homes. Under tanks. Blasted by rockets. Children, Wilf.’

‘I’m not denying it’ said Wilf. ‘There are terrible things going on. Tragic. Desperate. But people know that—from newspapers, from the TV. Not from travel guides!’

‘Are you kidding?’ She tilted her head back, smiling, to read his face. ‘Are you serious? Have you seen the papers lately? Fashion advice. Bitching about celebrities. Blah-blah-blah about the latest books and sit coms and who made what slip of the tongue in the Commons Tea Room. International crisis? What international crisis? Oh, that small print, the bit you’re meant to skip, between the Westminster gossip and the rugby results’.

Stop, though Wilf, staring as if he could control her words with his eyes. Stop now. Change your mind. If only she would let this go and take his hand, everything would be all right.

‘Even so,’ he said, still holding his gaze level, ‘even so. We’re being paid to write about a travel destination. Not global warfare’.

Another silence. Then Aggie started a fresh approach.

‘Naima used to tell me I had blinkered vision’.

Wilf set his jaw. Naima again. He couldn’t compete with Naima. Aggie went on:

‘She used to say, with me it was all theory. Not feeling’.

‘You?’ said Wilf, raising his eyebrows. ‘You’re the most sensitive person I know’.

‘But, but—what she meant—’ Aggie checked herself, and Wilf could see her rearranging her thoughts. She started again: ‘All over the world there are bullets flying, bombs exploding—we know that. We switch on the telly and see it. Women wailing, children baffled and broken, men hauled through streets, through their own blood … But the women are in strange clothes and the buildings are sandy and the streets are dusty, and it’s all somewhere else, isn’t it? Somewhere foreign. Part of our background. We know it’s all terrible, but—’

‘In theory’.

‘Yes’. She stepped towards him. ‘And that’s what Naima was on about. And that’s why I wanted to do this series…’

‘And that’s why that mad bastard blew himself up on Bay Bridge’ said Wilf. She looked as if he’d struck her. Wilf was trembling. He resented her for dragging his opinions from him like a surgeon pulling out his innards.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked him, in a kind of gasp.

‘I mean, whoever it was, the bloke who set off his belt of explosives … I mean, in his own twisted way, didn’t he think he was taking us out of theory? Shaking us out of our complacency? Making us feel as well as think?’

Her face crumpled into furious incredulity. He thought she was about to speak. Then she swivelled on her heel and went to retrieve her backpack. Wilf watched her busying herself with the straps and shouldering it on.

‘You can’t go on your own’ he said. ‘Not here. Don’t be an idiot’.

‘I wasn’t planning to,’ she said, ‘but apparently I’ve got no choice’.

Wilf threw his last plea at her back.

‘Aggie, don’t go. I love you.’

She turned to face him.

‘No’ she said. ‘We’re too far apart for love’.

Now the contractions in his throat were almost uncontrollable. He sniffed violently. He clenched his fists and his voice broke out in a wail.

‘It is love!’

She considered him with sympathy. She moved her back, redistributing the load. She said,

‘Not really. People who love each other share the same thoughts. They believe in the same things. We’re not like that’.

‘We are! We’ve done all this together—’

‘It’s not enough, Wilf. We should spark off each other. Delight in each other’.

The phrase caught him unawares. Even in his wretchedness, even in the heat, in this barren, menacing place, Wilf was struck by its incongruity. She sounds like a schoolgirl, he thought. Like a Mills & Boon. But he heard himself answer:

‘I do delight in you’.

It sounded so feeble that he expected her to laugh, but she just repeated:

‘It’s not enough.’

And she walked away, over the invisible border.

Despite his fear Wilf called after her.

‘What are you going to do? Put it all right? Bring Naima back?’ She walked on. ‘What good will you be to anyone?’ he roared, as she merged into the haze. His voice filled the space between them, collided with the mountains, clashed against the sky. Wilf began to follow her. He knew that was what he had to do. But Wilf had never pretended to be a brave man. After a few yeards he gave way to his terror, leapt for his backpack and half-ran away from the border and back to safety.

He finished the guide without her. Visited all the villages, mountain shrines and grey industrial centres left on their itinerary, took diligent notes, worked his slow way back through grades of poverty to grades of wealth. From the empty border shack he walked six miles back to the crumbling settlement they’d passed through the previous day. From there he wangled a lift on a cattle truck to the nearest market, and from then on it was a rambling, stalling five-week journey: on coaches, crushed against men with accrid pipes and women carrying baskets of ducks and flea-ridden chickens; on the back of a youth’s moped, trailing black exhaust fumes; in a death-defying taxi, skimming the edges of precipitous mountain roads; on trains with wooden boards for seats. Presently he was back in the suburbs, where all prospect of war was swallowed by the everyday din. From an internet café he sent Paul a message: Heading home. Phones out of range. Will call later. He’d have to tell him eventually. He couldn’t bear to think how Paul would react. He couldn’t bear to think about any of it at all. When he did, he was overwhelmed with fury. Fury with Aggie, for being the way she was. Fury at himself, for loving her.

His phone was useless in a place like this. He gave up trying to get a signal; Aggie certainly wouldn’t be within range, wherever she was. She might as well be lost in space. Sometimes Wilf reassured himself that she’d probably turned tail within the hour; that she was just making a point. In fact, she was probably on a train right now, heading for the airport, beating him to it. He spent his last night in the city on a bunk in a backpackers’ hostel. He couldn’t face that filthy, fume-choked, gnat-infested rooftop. He spent the evening repacking his rucksack and replaying their argument. He mimmicked her words in a splintered falsetto—‘We should delight in each other’—as he pushed the tip of his penknife along the inner rim of his thumbnail and watched a tiny tide of muck build ahead of it. ‘It’s not enough. It’s not love’.

‘Sorry, mate?’ A tall, bearded Australian peered in through the dormitory door. Wilf said,

‘No—just talking to myself’.

‘Yeah, that’s the trouble with travelling alone. Messes with your head’ said the man, and loped away.

‘I’m not travelling alone’ protested Wilf under his breath. ‘I’m with her’.

And where was she? Bound and gagged, shot to pieces, or sitting at a camp fire, chatting away to some bearded militia man?

Wilf saw the Australian again at the airport, the following day, as he killed time shambling past neon boutiques and ‘rustic’ eateries. He saw him filing through the security gates, between police officers cradling guns almost as big as themselves, with a group of companions, all grimy and high from their travels. Wilf slipped back into the duty-free and skulked among the wines and spirits and foil-wrapped chocolates. He wasn’t in the mood to talk.

‘What do you mean?’

Paul frowned over his Grande americano.

‘I mean, she buggered off. Without a backward look’.

‘Into the war zone’.

‘Into the war zone’.

Wilf’s eyes dropped away from Paul’s incredulous stare.

‘On her own’.

‘I begged her not to go’.

‘Wilf, that is not the point. You should have gone after her. You should have—!’ His sentence disintegrated like a deflating balloon.

Wilf searched for something positive to say.

‘If it was the war zone,’ he offered, pathetically. ‘Maybe our map was wrong. Maybe the border’s changed. I mean, they’re changing all the time. It looked pretty quiet. No guards or checkpoints, nothing like that. Just a road you wouldn’t want to go down. Like Dalston on a dark night’.

Paul was still staring. Wilf shifted his chair to make room for a woman balancing a small dog in the crook of one arm and a coffee in her free hand. Paul said,

‘In that case, why in the name of … of everything didn’t you GO—’ his eyes flicked to the side, registering the presence of other customers, and he reduced his voice to a hiss—’after her?’

‘I … I don’t know. I’m sorry. Because I’m crap’.

‘Yes’ said Paul, simply, ‘you are’. He finally looked away. ‘More fool me, I suppose’ he said ‘for employing you in the first place. Excuse me—’ His arm shot out as the waitress skirted a nearby table. ‘Could I get some more milk here please?’ He gave Wilf a quick look of assessment. ‘So—what did you do?’

‘I finished the guide’ said Wilf. He caught the gleam in Paul’s eye before it could be doused.

‘You’re kidding me’ said Paul.

‘Well … I didn’t really know what else to do’.

Paul nodded gravely.

‘OK, well … that’s something, I suppose …’.

The waitress appeared between them and handed Paul a small jug of milk.

‘Cheers’ said Paul. He poured milk into his cup, moving the jug up and down to alter the stream. ‘So … when you say you’ve finished …’

‘I mean finished. Done. Background, route directions, map data, the lot.’

For the first time since he’d greeted Wilf at the café Paul allowed himself a smile.

‘Good’ he said. ‘Good. That, at least, is true professionalism.’ Then the smile contracted, the brow furrowed, and his voice dropped to a murmur. ‘Let’s just hope and pray Aggie makes it back from her walk on the wild side, and we can pick up where we left off’.

Wilf swayed in his chair, caught by a fresh wave of misery.

‘Do you think she will?’

‘No doubt about it, old mate’ said Paul, with a hint of sympathy. ‘Whatever else she might be, our Aggie is tough little cookie’.*

‘The sun always seems to find this room’ says Lambert. ‘Make yourself comfortable, old boy’.

Wilf sinks back in the wicker chair and stretches his legs. No papers on the floor this time: only a square of glorious heat. He moves his bare toes. He’s too full of food, too windblown and too soothed by sunlight to care about propriety. In a corner of the conservatory his discarded boots and socks harden inside their shell of mud. Wilf tries to remember where he is and why he’s there. His thoughts swim in the warmth of the sun. Lambert says,

‘How about a pair of slippers? Mine are on the roomy side for you, but my aunt’s might be a neater fit’.

‘No, thanks…’

The words are clear enough inside Wilf’s skull but ooze from his mouth like treacle.

‘I’ll hunt them down while the kettle’s boiling’.

Lambert lopes away and Wilf surrenders to the sun and the far call of gulls.

Upstairs, Lambert forages among the shoes beached at the bottom of the wardrobe. All have been separated from their partners, all stretched and worn to a similar, squarish shape, bulging around the toes. Her feet must have been swollen to stumps, poor old dear. Brown shoes, navy blue, beige and black: Lambert sweeps them aside, uncovering a couple of sharp-edged shoeboxes, still lidded and apparently brand new. He lifts the lids quickly to check, though knowing he won’t find what he’s looking for here. No: these are her party shoes, her promise of slimmer, swifter feet and gold-edged invitations. One pair of red, wedged sandals with plastic flowers at the toe; one gleaming pair of court shoes—both as shiny and stiff as the day they were taken from the shelf. Lambert replaces the lids and pats them, quelling a surge of compassion. He’s about to give up on the search when he spies a sugar-pink tuft and pounces on it, freeing it from the rubble of footwear and lifting one fluffy slipper like a fish on a hook. After unearthing its companion he gets to his feet and casts a look round the room. Her bed is stripped, her bedside table clean and tidily arranged with an empty jug and tumbler, a book and a pair of reading glasses. He never uses this room himself. He’s not a delicate man, but he couldn’t bring himself to occupy that bed. For the first few weeks, he made do with a small sofa in the next room, which is actually bigger and brighter and has a better sea view. Eventually he acquired a bed. There was a radio by the sofa when he moved in, and a large box of materials, wool and a half-finished embroidery. He imagines she must have used it as a sitting room and saved the downstairs for best. There are photographs there, too: a wedding, a couple with a baby, but his guess is that these are distant relatives. Certainly there have been no concerned phone calls or visitors since his arrival, and Christmas cards have been the only personal items of mail.

Her name was Josephine Walker. Never Jo or Josie on her envelopes or documents. Most of the Sunbeam regulars refer to her as Mrs Walker; some only as ‘her on the cliff’. They all accepted his version of events without interest. Presumably nobody except Mrs Walker ever ventured up this unlit clifftop route. When Lambert turned up on a wet winter’s evening with his suitcase and his broken umbrella, the smell was detectable from the road. A putrid, vegetable smell that he recognised immediately. He tried the front door without luck, fought his way past a chubby privet and through an open side door into the back garden, and found the conservatory unlocked. He had to wrap his scarf taut around his nose and mouth to go in search of the source. In fact, when he reached her little bedroom he was able to pull his scarf down again. The worst of the stench had filled the rest of the house, but she was beyond gas and liquid, virtually beyond flesh, and entering the drier, cleaner stage of decomposition. Her skin had shrivelled and blackened, revealing lengths and planes and segments of bone. She lay on her bed, her head at an improbable angle on the pillow, what remained of her feet poking out beyond the coverlet. One arm had contracted, pulling her hand up into a casual wave. The other jutted over the edge of the bed. Her book lay in a shaggy pyramid on the floor, her glasses sprawled over its spine.

‘Good evening’ Lambert said. ‘Please excuse my intrusion’.

He approached her body and tentatively raised the coverlet. There was a crackling noise as the skin of her chest came away with it, and Lambert let it drop back into place. He stood over her for a moment, unsure what to do.

‘Allow me to introduce myself’ he said. ‘Lambert Stokes. History teacher. Rather in need of digs, but rather short of readies. Would you mind awfully…?’

He dealt with it himself, out there in the garden, in the rain, with a spade he recovered from the open tool shed. It took him three hours to dig a sufficiently deep hole. The catch of the spade alternated with the clap of waves below. Afterwards, he opened all the doors and windows and emptied a cannister of ‘Spring Day’ air freshener. Once the house was bearable he heated a tin of tomato soup from the kitchen cupboard and ate it in the conservatory, while sprays of rain brushed the glass and fanned across the wooden floor.

She sounded subdued. Timid, even. Wilf squeezed the phone against his ear and delivered the phrases he’d been rehearsing for a week.

‘There are things to discuss. Practicalities.’

Where had he picked them up? There must be a stock of relationship clichés stored away in the brain for emergency use. ‘No pressure’ he said. ‘We just need to sort things out’.

She wasn’t arguing. All that assertiveness he’d practised splashed around too heavily on the bad line, and from far away her voice said,

‘OK. Where shall we meet?”

They met at her favourite café. The hippy place, they called it: pine tables and community notices on a big cork board. She was reading them when Wilf arrived. Her elbows were angled behind her, hands in the back pockets of her jeans. Salsa classes, transcendental meditation, sign up here for our barter system, organic veg for sale … She wasn’t really reading, he could tell. Just waiting. He knocked against a chair and she swung round. She seemed pleased but wary, unsure of his mood. Wilf liked that. It made a change for Aggie to be monitoring his response. He suppressed a smile, didn’t touch her, indicated a table and said,

‘What can I get you?’

They sat opposite each other, hunched over their drinks. Wilf’s coffee tasted of oats. He let it go cold. He said,

‘I finished the guide’.

She raised her head and her eyes travelled round the room, glancing off his face but failing to settle.

‘I shouldn’t have left you to it’ she said. It was as close as she would ever get to ‘sorry’.

‘Doesn’t matter’. He didn’t want to ask about her experience, didn’t want to acknowledge it at all, but he knew it would have to be done.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘Was it … How was it?’

She blew air through her mouth and shook her head.

‘I’m such a cretin.’

Wilf said, ‘I should have gone with you’.

‘I wasn’t there long’ she admitted. ‘I turned back’.

Shame and relief prickled Wilf’s scalp. She’d turned back. And he’d already gone. She didn’t seem to be accusing him, though. She wouldn’t have expected him to wait.

‘What did you see?’ he asked. She shrugged.

‘I suppose I expected to cross a line, between one life and another.’

‘War and peace?’

‘Suppose so.’

She was craning her head back, reliving a memory, and he was looking at a scratch on her neck and telling himself not to reach forward and touch it, not to touch her skin. She doesn’t love me, he reminded himself. We’re too different. She doesn’t love me.

A family fell into the café with a fanfare of commands from the mother, hooting noises from a small boy and a high-pitched whine from a toddler. The pushchair reared and stamped its way between tables.

‘Sorry—sorry—’ said the mother. ‘Toby! Toby, shall we look at the cakes?’

Aggie watched their progress and Wilf watched Aggie. When the family was out of earshot she said,

‘Give Toby a couple of years and he’d be nursing a machine-gun out there.’

The little party crowded round a glass display of cakes and puddings. Aggie said,

‘I wish to God …’ then stopped. She had tears in her eyes.

Wilf formulated a question and tested ways of asking it. Tenderly? That would be pretty mature; that would give him the high ground. But suddenly the prospect of showing his emotions made him feel physically sick. Aggie said,

‘It was so quiet. At first. That’s what was weird. I mean, that used to be a main road, didn’t it? A major trade route. Now it’s just a road into trouble’.

‘So what did you see?’ asked Wilf again.

‘I went on walking for a while,’ she said, ‘and then this dog started barking at me. It was guarding something on the other side of the road. A pile of something. So I go sidling past, and look back, and it’s gone back to it, eating it. Snout right in there, worrying at it. And there’s a face. It’s a person. A dead person’.

She stared towards Wilf’s chest, into some distant scene.

‘You know how they identified Naima?’ she said. ‘Her bracelet. She had a silver bracelet with her name on it. That’s all they had. For a while we kept hoping she’d been somewhere else’.

Wilf waited. She added: ‘You were right, Wilf. What good was I doing to anyone?’

He tried not to show his intense satisfaction. I knew it, he thought. I knew she’d come back. Aggie said again, with awe:

‘A person. Being eaten by a dog’.

Wilf couldn’t help himself: he said,

‘Well. It’s a war zone’.

‘Yes, but fuck it—!’

They sensed a tightening among the family group and Aggie turned and said ‘Sorry’. The mother ignored her; Toby fixed her with unblinking fascination. Aggie lowered her voice.

‘What I’m saying is, when you see it—I mean … You think, it can’t be real. It’s a set-up. A film. I don’t know … You know it’s there, but you don’t believe it’.

‘It’s a war zone’ Wilf repeated., and she gave the table a little push.

‘I know. I know. And I see one dead man and it freaks me out. Pretty bloody pathetic’.

‘I didn’t say that’.

Aggie’s hand was shielding her eyes now, pressing them shut. She said,

‘The thing is, I was expecting … you know. Chaos. Noise.’

‘Action’.

She nodded without removing her hand.

‘And instead it was just a road. And a dead man being eaten by a dog’.

‘And then you turned back?’

It took all Wilf’s self-control to keep his voice neutral.

‘No. Not then. I went on. And I got to this—village, I suppose. Well, I say ‘village’—not really a village. More a kind of … I don’t know. An encampment.’

‘Refugees?’

‘I suppose so. Only they weren’t on the move, they weren’t running anywhere. Just sort of dumped on the road, with a load of stuff laid out on blankets, and carts, and a few donkeys … Like they’d been shoved a little way, ahead of the war, and then ran out of steam and just stopped.’

‘What did they make of you?’

‘Nothing to begin with. Barely gave me a look. And when they did it was that deadeyed look, that doesn’t really see anything. There were kids playing footie with a tin can. And there was this … atmosphere.’

‘Menace?’

‘Lethargy. Boredom. I don’t know—hopelessness. A kind of absence’.

On the other side of the café the family was arranging itself boisterously around a table. ‘Toby’, the mother was saying, ‘don’t pull Victoria’s hair, there’s a good boy’.

‘Then a jeep went by’.

‘A jeep?’ He sat bolt upright and she nodded, eyeing him from under her spiky fringe.

‘Yeah. Full of kids. With guns.’

‘Kids?’

‘Really, kids—I mean, 10, 12 years old, some of them. Teenagers. Shouting, and firing in the air.’

‘Shit’.

‘But honestly, they were just like normal kids who drive round shouting “get your knickers off”—you know?’

‘No’.

‘Only, with guns. And then they drive off, and there’s a bit of a kerfuffle, and there’s a woman on the side of the road, and she’s been shot.’

‘Killed?’

‘Wounded. I mean, really—’ Her faced knotted at the recollection. ‘I didn’t know what to do. Some boy was yabbering on and crying, and he grabbed my sleeve, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. So I gave him my water bottle, and he tried to give her some water, and it was spilling out, because—’ Her hand waved around to show him a sight she couldn’t describe.

‘Choccy!’ shouted Toby. ‘Choccy-ch0ccy-choccy cake!’ and his mother echoed him, two octaves lower: ‘Choccy cake, that’s right. Yummy yum’.

‘Her insides were … it stank… You know, all those accounts of Bay Bridge, all those eyewitnesses—noone mentioned the smell. Anyway … this boy—it might have been her son—he was trying to pull her skirt down. Protecting her dignity.’

Aggie sniffed loudly, raised her head with an effort, and pinched the bridge of her nose.

‘I didn’t know what to do. I wanted my mum.’

Wilf touched her, finally; touched her wrist, once.

She cleared her throat and sat up straight, and took on a brisk, conclusive tone. ‘Anyway. There was nothing I could do. This boy was grabbing at me, trying to stop me going. So in the end I said, I’ll fetch help. He probably didn’t understand me. But I said it anyway. I’ll fetch help. And sort of pointed. And then I left. Back the way I came’.

‘Like you said—there was nothing you could do’.

Aggie’s mouth smiled.

‘One dead, one dying, and I went to pieces. What would I have done if I’d found Naima? Promised to help and then legged it? Impressive, huh. Real cutting edge’. Her fingers drummed on the table. ‘I hadn’t thought it would be so quiet’.

There was a minor commotion as Toby dropped cake on the floor and trod in it. Wilf waited. He could tell Aggie wasn’t going to say any more. But she didn’t show any signs of wanting to go. He took the plunge.

‘On the border’ he said, ‘when you said—’

Aggie made a violent little movement of her head and said,

‘I didn’t mean it’.

Wilf drew in a long, wide breath. He wasn’t sure he believed her, but it didn’t matter much. She needed him, and that would do.

‘Come on’ he said at last. ‘Let’s go home’.

Wilf opens his eyes from a vivid dream already forgotten, and he can barely see a thing. A grey smog presses against his face and fills his lungs. Through it he begins to make out speckled forms and muffled speech. He concentrates, gathers his senses, looks and listens as hard as he can, and he creeps forward into the sitting room, inch by inch. Gradually a scene emerges and the movement arranges itself into several discrete bodies. Some are clothed, some naked. He understands that one is at the centre of the scene, arms extended; others kneel or bend around it, busy, at work: it’s a crucifixion, he thinks, or a medieval martyrdom. He recalls a painting he and Aggie saw in Bruges, of a saint—he forgets which one—being skinned alive. Medieval horror flicks, she’d remarked, and then she’d stepped closer to examine the brushwork. The figure at the centre of the sitting room rears and wrestles and issues a feral cry that halts the blood in Wilf’s veins. The cry rises and narrows to an inhuman scream, and he shouts back:

‘Aggie! Aggie!’ and wakes to the ring of Lambert’s phone.

The ringing stops. Somewhere in the house, Lambert is speaking. Wilf sits in the wicker chair, waiting for his heartbeat to subside. The sun’s gone in and he’s cold to the marrow. He wonders whether he really called Aggie’s name, or whether it was trapped inside his nightmare. He leans forward, trying to hear Lambert’s voice. But all he hears is,

‘Toodle-oo!’ and the click of an old-fashioned phone carriage, and then Lambert is there, ambling through the sitting room, and Wilf’s on his feet, startled by soft warmth between his toes. He’s wearing pink fluffy slippers. He can’t remember putting them on.

‘That was Gwennie’ says Lambert, ‘enquiring about numbers’.

‘Numbers?’

Wilf coughs away the hoarseness in his throat.

‘For dinner. I took the liberty of booking a place for you. And for yours truly. Gwennie’s evening meals are the stuff of dreams’.

Wilf massages his forehead.

‘Dinner? You mean … supper dinner?’

He tries to gauge the time of day. Lambert is bemused.

‘That’s right, my dear. Thought you might want to pass on lunch, after our double helpings, though if you need refuelling …’

‘No. NO!’ Wilf staggers, steps out of the slippers and looks at his watch. Ten past two. ‘God, no. Lambert—thanks for the … the tour. Of the house. I’d better go and … write. Write something.’

‘Of course, old lad. My pleasure entirely. Look forward to reading the end result.’

Lambert indicates Wilf’s boots. ‘Don’t forget your footwear. Won’t be pleasant I’m afraid. Should have tended to them, I suppose’.

Wilf retrieves one of the crispened socks.

‘See you at Rosehill’ says Lambert. ‘Seven sharp’.

Wilf spends the rest of the afternoon in the town library writing about Hestyn House. He feels better for it, for doing the job he came to do, and he starts plotting the rest of the itinerary again, delving into local maps and timetables, cheered by the library’s gentle industriousness. He focuses on drawing a general map of the area, then a diagram of the house, and the effort exorcises some of the effects of the secret room, and takes the edge off his nightmare. By the time he limps back to Rosehill he’s ready to tackle another meal and a meeting with the mysterious Martha Crick.

Not what he expected. Martha Crick is tall and bony and has the slightest suggestion of a squint. She rises from the dinner table as he enters the room and towers a good three inches over him. There’s something bizarre about the whole encounter, about its old-fashioned formality and role-reversal. She extends a great shovel of a hand, which swamps Wilf’s own, and he notices that her feet too are unusually large, though she stands gracefully in fifth position. The possibility occurs to him that Martha Crick was once a man.

‘Nice to meet you’ she says ‘at last’, and the voice is high-pitched, piping, with a chorus-girl lisp.

The hair’s right, thinks Wilf. Yes—very Martha Crick hair. Short, pert and fair, with a side parting and what looks like a Marcel Wave. In fact, if it wasn’t for her height and those enormous hands and feet she’d be straight out of a 1930s musical, with her flowery dress bouncing round her knees in the wake of every movement.

They take their seats around two tables pushed together.

‘I thought we’d make it a proper meal,’ says Gwennie, signalling places, ‘an occasion, to celebrate my first full house since … oh, I don’t know when’.

Wilf and Martha are placed opposite each other. Lambert watches their small talk, turning from one to the other with a benign, parental air. Martha asks about Wilf’s guide, about other books he’s written, about other places he’ll visit, and Wilf gives bland replies.

‘It must be so interesting’ lisps Martha, ‘seeing new places all the time’.

‘It should be’ says Wilf, ‘but you’re always in a rush to get on to the next one’. He blinks rapidly and adds, ‘In fact I should have been on the move already…’

‘All in good time, old chap’ murmurs Lambert, and ‘Very glad you extended your visit’, with an ecclesiastical dip of the head.

Wilf asks about Martha’s line of work.

‘I cheer places up’ says Martha Crick. Wilf can’t stop studying that squint. Just a whisper of a lazy eye. Quite appealing. Martha tells him she works for the Redevelopment Board. She uses terms like ‘resource-efficient’ and ‘landscape uplift’ and Wilf’s soon lost in a fog of jargon. Presently Lambert chips in:

‘Do I take it your role is to tour our world-weary communities giving them the woman’s touch?’

Martha grins, revealing a narrow gap between her front teeth.

‘You could say that’.

‘So you visit new places all the time too’ says Wilf.

‘Yes!’ She nods emphatically and a snaky strand of hair falls over her face. ‘But I’m always looking for ways to change them. You see them as they are.’

‘What improvements have you in mind for our humble corner?’ asks Lambert. His left hand wraps itself around the handle of his silver knife.

Martha’s huge palms spread out on either side of her face.

‘Oooh, lashings of hanging baskets, tree-planting, who knows … But actually I’m here on holiday’.

‘Oh, really?’ asks Wilf. ‘In Hestyn? Why here?’

The door opens and a magnificent aroma billows in. Meat, a crisp edge of something roasted, a speckling of herbs … Wilf had thought he’d never be hungry again, but now he has to work his stomach muscles to control the rumbling.

‘What brings you to Hestyn?’ he persists. ‘Specifically?’

Martha doesn’t seem to hear. She’s too busy praising Gwennie’s culinary talents. Gwennie is trying not to smile too proudly as she dishes up. Slices of beef, impossibly succulent, with gravy of precisely the right consistency, rich and dark as chocolate, smooth as wine. Roast potatoes with skins that crackle like meringues and cloudily soft innards, golden carrots brushed with a tang of butter. Martha licks her lips and says,

‘Mrs Price, you’re an artist. That’s the only word for it. I’ll bet your family never wanted to leave home, did they?’

Gwennie simpers and Lambert says,

‘I have to say, Gwennie, even you have surpassed yourself this evening.’

‘Did you have a huge family to feed?’ asks Martha. Wilf notes her persistence, but he can’t divide his attention, not with one of Gwennie’s meals to savour. Lambert shuts his eyes in ecstasy as he eats his first forkful, then says,

‘Where did you get these carrots, Gwennie? Truly, they are carrots from heaven’.