When I had finished, Heather said, ‘Probably just a lost tourist checking out the mysterious house, or some anorak historian studying the lime kiln. It happens sometimes.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said. I scanned the group of people out on the patio. I didn’t know any of them. ‘But it was dark at the time. Talking about people being lost, where’s Derek tonight?’
‘He doesn’t like parties. I’m all on my own.’ Her tone was clipped, and it was clear that the subject was closed.
The thought of her coming here alone both excited and frightened me. ‘You must know plenty of people here?’
She rested her hip against the stone wall, adjusted her shawl and affected a bored tone. ‘Oh, sure, I know most of them. Tell me about Paris.’
I noticed that she didn’t have a glass in her hand. ‘Would you like a drink first?’ I asked.
‘How kind of you to ask. White, please.’
She turned and rested her palms on the top of the rough wall to lean and gaze down on the scene below while I went inside to the drinks table. Charlotte was playing the perfect hostess. She frowned when she saw me pouring a glass of white wine after the red. She had no doubt noticed Heather arrive and knew exactly who it was for, but she was too busy talking to an elderly academic-looking man in a tweed jacket and silver-rimmed glasses to come over and warn me off. I found myself beginning to resent her interference and disapproval, evident in the angry and frustrated glance she gave me. After all, Heather and I were both adults, and Charlotte seemed to be treating us like wayward children. Was Heather some kind of man eater, or did I have the unearned reputation of being a womaniser because I’d come from Hollywood and worked in the movie business? I was hardly Warren Beatty, after all.
I carried the drinks outside, still feeling a little resentful over Charlotte’s disapproving glance. Maybe she was madly in love with me and jealous of her friend. I doubted it.
Heather was where I had left her, talking to a middle-aged couple who turned out to be connected with one of the art shops in the town centre. I joined them and let my thoughts drift to other things and my eyes drift over the view while I nodded in all the right places and made all the right noises. I was aware of Heather looking at me from time to time. There was an intensity to her gaze that demanded it be returned. I didn’t return it. Finally, the couple drifted on. ‘You forgot to tell me about Paris,’ Heather said.
I told her, playing down the conversations I’d had with Sam Porter about Grace Fox, and instead concentrating on the sights and meals of the city. I left out any mention of the sketches and paintings Sam had shown me.
‘I wish I’d been with you,’ she said. ‘Think what a time we could have had. It’s been perfectly miserable back here.’
‘Stop it, Heather.’
‘But it has. You have no idea.’
I went on to tell her about visiting my brother’s farmhouse in Angouleme and the walks we had in the woods and by the river, the local wine we drank, the game of boules on the village green. But I didn’t tell her about the figure in the mirror I had broken the night I got my scar. She probably thought I was crazy enough already when it came to seeing things.
‘How exciting to have a brother with a farmhouse in France,’ she said. ‘My brother lives in a two-up two-down in Scunthorpe.’
I paused for a moment, not sure whether she meant it seriously, then I saw the muscles of her face had tensed in an effort to keep from laughing. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed first, and she joined me.
‘You should have seen your face,’ she said. ‘It’s not true, of course. Barry lives in a semi in Dorchester, but Scunthorpe just sounds so… desperate. Do you remember the old joke about Scunthorpe?’
‘Which one?’
‘If Typhoo put the “T” in Britain, who put the-’
‘Heather, darling.’ It was Charlotte, escaped from her academic at last and worming her way between us, draping a possessive and restraining arm over Heather’s shoulders. ‘So good to see you. I do hope Chris here isn’t monopolising you?’
‘Not at all. I was just telling him that if he’d played his cards right at dinner the other night all this could have been his.’
Charlotte blushed. ‘Heather!’
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ Heather said. ‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I’m not being serious. Actually, I was just telling Chris an old joke about Scunthorpe. If Typhoo-’
The first fireworks lit up the sky with bursts of red, gold and blue. The guests all moved out on to the patio, which soon became crowded. Heather and I were pushed together close to the wall. We had a great view, and our bodies couldn’t help but touch. Heather turned halfway towards me, and I felt the firmness of her breast against my arm. We just about had room to lift our drinks to our mouths. Charlotte was somewhere behind us, drawn into the crowd, chatting away to someone else, no doubt keeping a sharp eye on us, annoyed that she couldn’t get close enough to intervene.
Laura had loved fireworks, and as I watched the display, a familiar melancholy made its way through my veins like a soporific. I could see her face in my mind’s eye, like a child’s, lit up by the fireworks, yes, but with an inner light, too, shining out of her. She had looked like that at the very end as she lay dying, holding my hand, before the light was extinguished, quoting one of her favourite poems. ‘Don’t feel sad, my love. I am already “half in love with easeful death”.’
From behind the castle walls, bursts of red and green fire continued to shoot high into the air and explode into shapes like dragons’ tails or enormous globes, then crackle or bang, leaving wispy trails behind as they fell to earth. I tried to turn away from my melancholy, remembering the Bonfire Nights of my childhood. We never had anything like this, of course. All the kids in the neighbourhood saved up for months to buy their meagre supplies of volcanoes, rockets, jumping crackers, Catherine wheels and threepenny bangers, while we amassed our piles of chumps, carefully guarded against raids from other gangs. On the night itself, the fire was lit in the middle of the cobbled street – there were few cars in the neighbourhood then – and everyone, old and young, gathered around for parkin and treacle toffee and potatoes baked in tinfoil on the fire. We set off our own fireworks, shooting rockets from milk bottles, nailing the Catherine wheels to wooden fences.
I felt a hand rest on mine. ‘Penny for them,’ a soft voice said in my ear.
I turned, summoned back from my melancholy and nostalgia. Heather’s face was close to mine, illuminated in the multicoloured light from the sky. It felt like a moment from To Catch a Thief. Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. Unmemorable score by Lyn Murray. I could have kissed Heather right there and then, and I would have, but we were surrounded by people she knew, people who no doubt also knew her husband. She knew it, too. I gave her hand a light squeeze. She squeezed back and let go. ‘You seemed miles away,’ she said. ‘Were you thinking about your wife?’
‘No, I was just remembering Bonfire Nights when I was a kid,’ I said, editing out my thoughts of Laura. ‘It wasn’t all so organised then.’
‘It’s always been like this for me,’ Heather said wistfully, glancing up at the sky. ‘Oh, I don’t mean being here, like this, just organised. You know, you pay to go in, sometimes they have a band, you get drunk, someone’s sick all over your shoes, maybe you have sex in the bushes, there’s a fight…’ She gave a slight shiver and wrapped the shawl tighter around her shoulders.
‘Cold?’ I said.
‘No. A goose just walked over my grave.’
Later, driving her home in the car, I asked, ‘Do you think you could do me a small favour?’
‘Depends.’
‘Could you try and find out who the last owner of Kilnsgate House was?’
‘I’m not sure I can. He or she seemed to want to remain anonymous.’
‘But surely there must be records?’
‘You’ve got the deeds.’
‘They only name Simak and Fletcher.’
‘That’s the firm I dealt with.’
‘Maybe if I took a utility bill and asked them nicely?’
