He went in through an ill–fitting door which he had difficulty closing, and approached an old woman behind a reception desk who
was reading a Daphne De Maurier novel. Sensing his presence, she looked up at him through thin, silver-rimmed spectacles.
‘Have you got any singles available?’ he asked her.
‘Until tomorrow, possibly Monday.’
She closed the book:
Jamaica Inn
.
Apt
, he thought.
‘Yes, yes . . . I think so.
Hang on a moment.’ Her finger traced over a booking log book. She flicked over a couple of pages. ‘Oops, yes, here we are. That’s fine. Mr. –?’
‘Cassidy.
Matthew Cassidy.’
The woman began to fill in a new entry in the log book, then her pen froze, his name seared off by a jarring stroke which cut the entry box in two like a spade through wet soil.
‘Matthew . . .’
She looked up at him, and he felt a pang of recognition.
The woman had aged a lot in the years he had been away, but behind the folds of skin and the liver spots that mottled her face there was no doubt.
‘Mrs. Carter?’
His Year Six primary school teacher. ‘Is that
you
?’
‘Matthew
Cassidy
!’ As though to see him more clearly, she sucked her chin back into the jowls of her neck, reminding him of a farmyard hen. ‘Well, haven’t you grown up!
You’re the image of your father
.’
‘Why are you –’
‘Oh, I retired some years back, poor heart and all that. When old Mr. Bellray died, this place went on the market cheap, I think to keep it with local people. My Arthur and I – God rest his soul – thought it would provide a nice little income to keep us going.’ She lifted her glasses and rubbed her eyes. ‘It gets a little tough on my own, but in the summer I get in a couple of staff. Are you back for –’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m so sorry for your loss, Matthew. It’s tragic, terribly tragic. Such a beautiful girl. So . . .
angelic
. To go in such a way –’
Matt was keen to avoid this conversation.
How much she knew about his past he didn’t know, but he
did
know that in small towns people liked to talk. He wanted to keep his involvement in the place as minimal as possible.
‘Do you have the keys to my room, Mrs. Carter
? I’ve had a long drive, and I’d like to get settled in.’
‘Oh, yes, yes of course.’
She fumbled in a drawer beneath the desk. ‘Room six, top of the stairs. It looks out towards the hill. It’s a nice room, and we’re not all that busy.’
‘I’ll get my cases.’
He left her standing behind the desk, still prattling on to his back. So, she had set the tone for his visit. Forgotten faces returning to haunt him. Mrs. Carter was nice enough, but within an hour, the whole village would know that, after fourteen years, Matthew Cassidy was back.
###
Bethany’s Diary
, November 15th 1984
Christmas is coming, whoopee!! I can’t wait for the ground to be layered with snow. Daddy hates it because it makes his car difficult to drive, but I don’t think the car minds much. It looks quite warm and snug beneath that fluffy white blanket. I like to play out in the snow, though no one ever plays with me, because I always play at night. It’s nicer then, because it gets all shiny under the moon and the trees give it neat patterns. I’m hoping that next time Mummy comes she’ll leave some tracks . . .
5
There was no such familiar face in the village store, and Matt bought himself a bottle of Bell’s Malt in gleeful anonymity. He had been desperate for a drink all day, and as he sat at the window of his room and looked out across the churchyard to the fields and forest beyond, to the lane, partly obscured by unchecked foliage, that led up the hill and through the trees to his father’s house, he took a first swig from the bottle. He felt its scolding warmth illuminate him and begin to dissolve his fears like nothing else ever had. A little more and he might feel ready to face his father.
Through the top of the trees beyond the church he thought he could just see the uppermost
peak of his father’s roof, thought it was difficult to tell for certain in the fading light. Perhaps a few years ago the whole upper floor would have been visible, but the trees had grown up a little since then. No one would have cut them; his father had never respected prying eyes.
Tomorrow, his sister would be buried.
The last link to that place, besides his father. He would have to wait to find out where the funeral would be, though. Matthew would prefer to see her in the churchyard he could see now, in the centre of the village, amongst real people, but suspected his father would want otherwise.
At the back of their house a path led down into the woods.
It had always seemed overgrown, even though his father had regularly cut the undergrowth back to clear a way through, especially in the springtime when brambles and bracken sprouted almost overnight. The path led down to a stream at the valley’s bottom, to a little crossing made of heaped stones, like a child’s dam. It then rose up through the trees and the undergrowth on the other side, almost to the summit of the hill, where it opened out into a clearing.
Matt had been there countless times during his childhood, exploring, storming his enemy’s stronghold, hunting invisible aliens.
Picking his way through the overgrown entrance into the tumbledown building itself, between the cross beams of the collapsed roof, up on to the raised preacher’s platform at the back, to stand victorious. The old ruined chapel at the back of the clearing had been the site of so many of his childhood fantasies and adventures; for a long time a placed he had loved, as a boy’s base camp, as a place for solitude, and for refuge.
Until they had buried his mother there
.
Matt swigged from the bottle until he thought he would choke.
6
By seven o’clock a light drizzle had begun to fall, and its presence helped to sober Matt up as he made his way across from the Bed & Breakfast towards the lane leading up to his father’s house. He cut across the village green and through the churchyard, stepping among the lichen-covered gravestones of his ancestors, their names lost now to time. He soon regretted it as the soggy ground quickly soaked his shoes, but at least the whiskey gave him an
otherness
that helped him forget the discomfort.
Two five-foot granite gateposts marked the entrance to his father’s lane, a gravel trail lea
ding blindly up into the dark. Once, two imposing stone gargoyles had guarded the entrance, horrible squat things like mutated cats with short, hooked horns and contorted, mocking smiles. One had been stolen, for reasons unknown, when Matt had been ten or eleven, and never recovered. The other had been knocked from its perch when a drunk driver had careened into the right-side gatepost a couple of years later. The gatepost had been re–erected but no one had ever bothered to replace the gargoyle, and it had stayed face down in the undergrowth at the foot of the hedge where it had fallen. He could see it now, in the glow cast by a street lamp behind him, carpeted with moss and partially buried under years of decomposing vegetation. At some point someone had come along and kicked it further along the road, and it now lay a good ten feet from the lane entrance, just short of where a black Nissan car had been parked tight in against the hedge.
Matt frowned.
There were no houses close by, and he wondered if his father had a visitor. He didn’t want to intrude (
not an excuse not an excuse
) and for a moment thought about turning back. The pub was just a street away. But no, his father’s house was fronted by a wide courtyard, so any guests would park there. The car must belong to someone inside the church. Grudgingly, he turned back towards the dark lane entrance.
As he began the steep climb towards his father’s house, he found, even now, after so many years, that he could skip between the puddles and the potholes like an old pro, his instincts leading him where the obscured moonlight could not.
Just as he had done so many thousands of times as a child, he felt he could run this lane blind, even if now his poor physical condition might resent it.
Trees loomed on
both sides and the forest he had once taken for granted became a thing of menace to his acute writer’s mind. Every rustle of undergrowth potentially yielded a man, or a dog, or something perhaps worse, something that he could only identify at the back of his mind as a foreboding, unwelcome presence. His father had scheduled the funeral for tomorrow, and by Monday Matt wanted to be gone, back to Lancashire, the kids and Rachel. Monday at the very latest. If he could stay sober, he wanted to be gone by tomorrow night.
You can’t just leave like that, you know you can’t.
The thought hit him like a hard slap across the face, and for a moment he stumbled, catching his footing just in time to avoid tumbling towards the puddles hidden in the dark at his feet. Just a thought, just a stupid, irrational thought, but it had snagged him like the barb of a fisherman’s hook. His very presence back in Tamerton had opened up a whole can of long forgotten emotions that would take time to sort, time he didn’t have.
Time he didn’t want to give.
He should have stayed away. They didn’t need him, hadn’t for fourteen years. His sister wouldn’t know he had come; she was dead, after all.
And what sort of reception could he expect from his father
? Ian Cassidy had made the call to
him
– only Heaven knew how he had found Matt’s number – but how much of that had been as a duty? How much did he really want to see his son?
Welcome home son.
Welcome home, little me.
‘No!’ Matt snarled through gritted teeth, and wished he had brought the bottle with him.
The lane reached the brow of the hill, opening out on to a wide gravel courtyard. Opposite, through the sheeting rain which glittered beneath two large spotlights on either side of a wide porch, stood the house.
Home.
No! Not home. Home is Lancashire. Home is with my family. This is the past. And what’s in the past is gone, might as well have never been. I don’t need you.
Why did you have to call?
It rose like something out of
Dracula
, four storeys high, dating originally, Matt thought, from sometime around the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries but restored numerous times since then. From its recessed entrances to the balustrade that ran all the way around the steeply pointed roof, it displayed many of the Gothic features that so typified that period, even down to some of the smaller windows which were made from a number of decorated panels fitted together. Many of these had long since been replaced, but especially around the back of the house Matt remembered how some of the windows had been constantly grimy from the dirt and bird mess caught in the elaborate designs.
On the right-
hand side of the building was a two storey annex which housed the garage and a clutch of storerooms overhead. Not that they had ever needed storage space; only the three of them had lived there permanently, though sometimes his uncle had overnighted and a maid had stayed over to clean and launder from Tuesday to Thursday. Matt doubted he had even
seen
all of the rooms, and often wondered how his family had ended up living in such a monstrous place.
By his teens he had known the house had been in his family for generations, his father’s i
ncome generated from land rents and the occasional sale of a patch of ground for development. There was a title somewhere in his family; Lord or Baron, maybe, though his father had never used it. He had a vague memory of overhearing his grandfather being referred to with a title, but both grandparents on his father’s side had died during his early childhood; their graves were in the churchyard in the village. Those on his mother’s side had always been strangely absent. She had never spoken of them, and he had rarely asked; perhaps she had had her own family rift to deal with. If she were alive now he thought she might understand how he felt.
Looking up at that huge building, he realised his father was sitting on a goldmine.
With lands covering several miles of forests, moors and farmland, his father’s worth was immeasurable. Even had Bethany still been alive Matt would have stood in line to inherit enough to put aside ideas of working for the rest of his days, and probably those of his family. Even if his father had written him out of the will he still had rights. He would have gotten a substantial portion at least.
I don’t want it.
I want to forget this place, it’s all I’ve ever wanted. There’s too much blood here, too much darkness.