interest in the body. He’d found a supplanting fascination in the sea itself and was now trying to catch the waves, fighting them back with all the optimism of a canine Canute. He’d managed to soak his body through in the process.
One sharp call was enough to bring the dog to heel. He dissociated himself from the sea, looking round innocently as if he’d only just noticed its vast expanse. Carole stood back as he shook the tell-tale brine out of his coat. Then he rolled over in a mass of seaweed and something else more noxious. Carole registered dully that Gulliver would need a bath when they got home.
She gave one last look to the dead man by the breakwater, then started resolutely up the beach, Gulliver trotting maturely at her side.
¦
It was only half-past seven when they got back to High Tor. Carole had woken early that morning, slow to adjust to the recent change from Summer Time, and got up briskly, as she always did. Thinking too much at the beginning of the day could so easily become brooding. It had been dark, the night’s full moon invisible, when she and Gulliver left for their walk, and it was still gloomy when they returned, the kind of November day that would never get properly light. And never warm up either.
Carole bathed the dog before calling the police, splashing him down with a hose outside the back door. She knew, if she didn’t, the house would smell of rotting seaweed for weeks. Gulliver never made a fuss about being bathed. He seemed positively to enjoy the process. Maybe it was the intimacy with his mistress he valued. Carole Seddon was not given to sentimental displays, least of all to animals, so Gulliver enjoyed the ration of contact he received from the necessary scrubbing and drying. In the cold weather she was particularly careful to get the last drop of water out of his coat.
When the dog was shining clean and snuffling into sleep by the Aga, and when Carole had mopped up the inevitable wet footprints he had left on the kitchen floor, it seemed natural for her to continue cleaning the kitchen. As a result, it was after nine before she went into the sitting room to confront the telephone.
She had gone through the walk back from the beach, as well as the mechanical processes of bathing Gulliver and cleaning the kitchen, without allowing herself to think about what she had seen. She had kept an equally tight control on her body, not permitting it the slightest tremor of reaction to the shock. As she had done frequently before in her life, Carole Seddon kept everything firmly damped down.
She dialled 999 and asked for the police. In simple, unemotional sentences, she gave them the necessary information. She described her actions precisely, the direction of her walk, the time she had returned, the fact that she had bathed her dog and cleaned the kitchen. She pinpointed the exact position where the body had been found and gave her considered estimate as to how long it would be before the returning tide reached that point. She gave her address and telephone number, and was unsurprised when told that someone would be round to talk to her.
Carole Seddon put the phone down and sat in an armchair. She did not collapse into an armchair. She sat in one.
And then she heard the strange noise from outside. Perhaps it had just started. Or it could have been going on unheard for some time, so intense had been her concentration on the task in hand.
The sound was a rhythmic dull thudding, something being hit repeatedly. Carole rose from her chair and moved tentatively towards the front-facing window. Through it, she saw Jude in the adjacent front garden. Her new neighbour had spread a slightly threadbare rug over a structure of boxes and was beating it with a flat besom brush. Though still wearing a trademark long skirt, Jude had removed her loose-fitting top to reveal a bright yellow T–shirt. Her large bosom and chubby arms shuddered with the efforts of her carpet-beating. In spite of the cold, her cheeks were red from the exercise.
Carole’s instinctive reaction was one of disapproval. There was something old–fashioned in Jude’s carpet- beating. The scene could have come from a film of back-to-back terraced houses in the 1930s.
Back doors were kept firmly locked. Approaches to people’s houses were made strictly from the front. And, except for essential gardening and maintenance, the only part of a front garden that was used was the path. Even if the space caught the evening sun, no one would dream of sitting in their front garden. And it certainly wasn’t the proper place to do anything domestic, like beating a carpet. Passers-by, seeing someone engaged in such activities, might be forced into conversation.
In Fethering, except for chance meetings in the High Street, social encounters were conducted by arrangement. It was inappropriate to meet someone without having received planning permission. A prefatory phone call – ideally a couple of days before the proposed encounter – was the minimum requirement.
These thoughts were so instinctive that they took no time at all to flash through Carole Seddon’s mind, but they still took long enough to allow something appalling to happen. Jude, taking a momentary respite from her efforts with the besom, had turned and caught sight of her neighbour framed in the window. Eye contact was unavoidable.
For Carole then to have repressed a half-smile and little flap of the hand would have been the height of bad manners. Her minimal gesture was reciprocated by a huge wave and a cheery grin.
If she had left the contact there, Carole knew she would have appeared standoffish. And, though standoffish she undoubtedly was, she had no wish to appear so. She found her hand and face doing a little mime of “I’ll come out and say hello.”
“My name’s Carole Seddon. Welcome to Fethering. If there’s anything I can do to help out, please don’t hesitate to tell me.”
“Thanks very much.” Carole found her hand grasped and firmly shaken. “My name’s Jude.”
“Yes…” Carole awaited the gloss of a surname, but wasn’t given one. “You’ll find we’re a friendly lot round here,” she lied.
“Good.” Jude chuckled. It was a warm, earthy sound. “I get along with most people. Most people do, don’t they?”
Carole granted this alien concept a thin smile. “Well, if I can tell you where things are…shops, dry-cleaners, you know…I’m only next door, so just ask.”
“Thanks. I’m sure I’ll find my way around pretty quickly.”
“Mm…” Carole found the openness of Jude’s dreamy brown eyes slightly disconcerting.
“Equally,” her neighbour said, “if there’s anything I can do to help you out, you’ll say, won’t you?”
Carole nodded this offer token gratitude, however incongruous might be the idea of her suddenly turning for assistance to someone she didn’t know. The woman had only just moved to Fethering, for goodness’ sake. Any support being offered should go from the established resident to the newcomer, not the other way round.
Surely Jude didn’t imagine her neighbour was about to confide in her? Carole was hardly likely suddenly to start spilling the beans to a stranger about what she’d seen on the beach. But even as she had the thought, she was surprised how much she did want to talk about the shock she had received that morning. And there was something in those brown eyes that invited confidences.
“Anyway” – Carole shook herself back on track – “better get on. Things to do.”
“Yes.” Jude grinned easily. “Me too. House is crammed full of boxes. God knows how long it’ll take me to sort it all out.”
“Moving’s always a nightmare.”
“Still, I can do it at my own pace. No hurry.”
Carole smiled as if she endorsed this view. But she didn’t. Of course there was a hurry. One couldn’t live in mess. One had an obligation to get one’s house tidy as soon as possible. If people weren’t aware of the necessity for hurry in life, society would break down completely.
“See you soon then.” Jude gave a relaxed wave and hefted her besom for a renewed assault on the carpet.
“Yes. Yes,” said Carole, turning in slight confusion back towards her front door.
Inside the house, she berated herself for how little solid fact she had got out of the conversation. She wasn’t that interested, of course, but there were things one ought to know about a new neighbour.
