Mary George of Allnorthover. Lavinia Greenlaw
had already gone!’
‘I got the last train, like we’d planned to.’
‘You didn’t say goodbye.’
‘You were busy.’
Mary stood up, her fists clenched. She and Billy had gone to the party in Crouchness together. She didn’t remember seeing much of him there, or noticing when he left.
Billy fiddled with the beads round his neck. ‘I slept out last night and walked it.’
‘The state of your feet. You’re turning into a satyr!’
Billy smiled and flexed his toes. ‘Perhaps I am at that.’ He hadn’t worn shoes for weeks and carried a pair of flip-flops to put on if a teacher approached.
‘And you stink of patchouli oil, Billy.’
‘And fresh air …’
‘Not even fresh air smells of fresh air any more.’ Mary had been in the room for five minutes and its atmosphere, soupy and stagnant, was making her sleepy as well. She curled up in another chair and closed her eyes.
When Mary’s father, the architect Matthew George, decided to go into partnership with the builder Christie Hepple, undertaking local conversions, he bought the old chapel.
The Chapel had been converted from a grain store by the local Baptists. They had replaced the roof, laid a stone floor, and whitewashed the brick and beams. Then their minister, the Reverend Simon Touch, had inherited a gloomy house on the High Street and had built a new chapel in its cavernous basement, complete with an immersion pool. Mary had once gone back there after school with his daughter Hilary, who had promised that she could dip her fingers in the tank. Hilary said people fell into it backwards for God ‘so the water runs up their noses.’ The water in the murky tank looked quite solid and Mary had wondered how anyone managed to sink into it. Whose hands helped them and how did they surface again?
The Baptists had put in a window above their altar, a large triangle of plain glass flush with the roof, under which Matthew worked on a raised platform he’d built along the centre of the building. There were rough stairs at the far end. Mary had liked to creep up and tiptoe along the aisle between the shelves of books, files and papers, like a library she said, to the end where the platform broadened to the width of the Chapel, level with the foot of the window, and Matthew sat perched on his spindly, rotating stool at his slanted drawing board, pencilling in tiny elegant numerals and angles. Mary would stand behind him at the window, recording her height on each visit by breathing on the glass.
On the ground floor, Christie had kept his tools and machinery. He also had a desk, a trestle table, pushed against one of the small windows that were shuttered and set deep in the wall. Mary would walk solemnly across this space, holding herself straight but looking quickly from side to side at all the sharp edges, the twists, spirals, points and planes.
Christie let Tom go in ahead of him. ‘Don’t be troubled if it’s not right.’ Even though light pushed through the windows, the interior of the Chapel was cool. Tom set down his rucksack and considered the swept floor, bare shelves, trestle table and stool. ‘Simple,’ he smiled.
‘It is that.’ Christie bustled past him to the back where there was a sink, cupboards and a Baby Belling two-ring cooker. Matthew had installed all this. He had stayed overnight there sometimes, more so towards the end, locking the door against Stella, whom Christie had found one morning, half asleep on the grass outside.
‘Cup of tea?’ Christie was busy unpacking carrier bags and filling the cupboards with tins of soup, beans and spaghetti; packets of biscuits, sugar, custard powder, dried milk and instant mash; bottles of tomato ketchup, malt vinegar and HP Sauce. Tom had hardly eaten anything, hardly slept either, in the two weeks that he’d been back. ‘I’ll come again first thing. You’re to sort out your benefit at the Post Office and I’ll fetch some more groceries.’ He took as long as he could to put things away, watching over the kettle as it boiled and then leaving the tea to brew till it was bitter and lukewarm, and the granules of dried milk floated greasily on its surface. He waited till Tom was nearby before handing him his mug, almost without turning round.
Tom carried his mug and rucksack carefully up the open staircase to where Christie had made up a mattress under the big window. Not having any curtains that would fit, he had taped blue sugar-paper over the glass. For Tom, this marine light made the place even cooler. By laying out his clothes, books, papers, pens and shoes across the floor and along the nearest shelves, he created a rectangle the same size as the space he had lived in on the hospital ward, the same as half the room he’d later shared in the hostel – four by eight paces. June’s room had been the wrong shape.
Christie understood that Tom needed to be somewhere familiar. He couldn’t be at ease in the new house but needed to be in the village. The Chapel was ideal, almost off on its own, nearer than anywhere else to the Dip, but not within sight of the water. Since Matthew had left, Christie had worked for people who had their own offices and drew up their own plans. He hadn’t needed the Chapel for anything more than a store. It only took a morning to sort out his tools and paints, transfer them to his garden shed and clean up the outhouse.
There was a filing cabinet of paperwork Matthew had left: old contracts and invoices for barn conversions, extensions and conservatories; rejected designs in concrete and glass for Havilton New Town; the chalet design they had worked on together for the holiday camp at Crouchness. Christie had also found some of the pamphlets Matthew had designed for Stella’s business: beige card printed with droopy chocolate-brown art nouveau script and edged with flowers. She had begun dealing in Victoriana when she came to clear out her parents’ home and decided to get rid of the dark, glossy, intricate clutter she had always hated. In doing so, she had discovered a market among London dealers for lace antimacassars, cameo brooches, fur tippets, kid gloves, jet beads, fish knives and sherry glasses.
When Matthew’s great-aunt Alice Spence died in the house she’d lived in for sixty years, Stella made her sons an offer. From there, she’d gone to auctions, placed small ads in local papers and people had just got in touch. She expanded into forged ironwork that was made to order by the son of Allnorthover’s last blacksmith, as the leaflet said – weathervanes, firescreens and flower-pot stands. When the dairy in the High Street closed down, Stella leased the premises and opened her shop, Hindsight, scrubbing out the abandoned churns and standing them by the door full of corn sheaves and dried flowers. The churns were still there, and now people kept trying to buy them. These days Stella was selling jazzy Twenties ceramics, framed prints of adverts from the Thirties and Forties, and enamelware.
Tom came down, tracing the wiring that was tacked along the side of the stairs. He followed it across the wall to the fusebox and from there to the clutch of switches by the door. He went over to the kitchen and pulled each plug from its socket, for the cooker, the kettle and the toaster, and put them back in again.
‘I’ve brought you something to keep you busy.’ Christie waved an arm at a heavy old wireless. ‘You were the only person that could make that cantankerous old thing behave, so I kept it for you.’ Tom knelt beside the wireless and ran his hand over the blistered veneer and the dusty cloth that covered the speaker – tiny red and cream diamonds, like material for a dress. The dials had yellowed and their grooves were worn smooth. ‘I kept this, too,’ Christie reached into one of the carrier bags and handed Tom a battered tin box. Tom opened it and began sorting through his tools. They were intensely familiar. Either he had always remembered the exact shade of blue paint and the shapes in which it had worn off the wooden handles of his pliers and screwdrivers, or they were reminding him of their long existence. The soldering iron weighed exactly in his hand, the cold heavy handle, the hard dullness of its colour, the bitter smell. Solder, fuses, batteries, bulbs and coils of copper wire all impressed themselves upon him, giving the pleasure of something not thought about for years, and then entirely and vividly remembered.
‘How … therapeutic.’ It was the first joke Tom had made since coming home.
‘You’ll be wanting hospital food next!’ Christie laughed, encouraged now and sure that his decision to