'I've thought where I can set it. It's near enough for me to go and have a look.'
Charlotte wasn't sure if she heard or otherwise sensed movement beneath her. The muffled subterranean activity had to be that of a train, and of course she hadn't felt the floor shift like a lid. 'Have I guessed where?' she said.
'I wouldn't be surprised.' Ellen paused for some kind of effect and said 'Thurstaston.'
Another train must be worming under the office, but Charlotte was more aware of having mouthed the name as Ellen spoke it, as if it were a prayer or some other kind of invocation. 'I'll finish this chapter and then I'll send them to you,' Ellen said. 'I was working on it when you rang.'
'Don't let me interrupt any more. I'll look forward to whatever's coming.'
At that moment the computer screen turned black. It had simply grown dormant, though it put Charlotte in mind of a window overwhelmed by a sudden fall of earth. She wasn't going to let it remind her of the earth that must be pressing against all the walls. She nudged the mouse to restore her words on the monitor. 'Enjoy your research,' she said as a farewell.
THIRTEEN
Ellen was about to ask the children what they were doing on the swings when she saw that the house was for sale. A family must be viewing it, since a man was staring down at her from the attic bedroom that she and her cousins had shared until their aunt and uncle had begun to worry they were too mature. He seemed to take Ellen for an intruder, spying over the hedge with crime in mind. She could assure him that she'd spent several of the best weeks in her life here, except that it didn't quite live up to her memory: the trees and bushes that had turned the garden into a maze full of dens had been cut back, and where were the vines that had elaborated the adventure? The elder relatives must think this was the way to sell it, and at least the will donated the proceeds to a children's home. Ellen blinked her eyes more or less dry for a last sight of the house, and turned away as the man at the top told the children not to swing too high. None of this would help her with her book.
The row of houses overlooked a gravel track for walkers and cyclists alongside a bridle-path, beyond which fields and woodland stretched to the brink of the cliff. Ellen might have found the gap in the hedge and made straight for the field where she and her cousins had pitched camp, but after almost two hours on a pair of trains preceded and succeeded by buses, she needed a walk. The low unbroken cloud stained grey and black had none of the stale heat she'd brought with her. As she tramped a mile to the visitor centre she felt coated with humidity, which gave her little chance to think about her book.
The occasional cyclist overtook her so discreetly that they made her feel followed by someone she couldn't hear, and the odd head peered down at her – riders, of course. On this weekday afternoon the visitor centre was almost deserted. Ellen plodded along the corridor decorated with children's essays about nature to the Ladies', where she splashed her face with handfuls of cold water. She managed to splash the mirror above the sink, distorting her reflection, which appeared to sag and spread. She hurried out of the building rather than waste time wiping the glass.
Ought she to walk along the beach or the top of the cliff? It might be cooler near the water, and perhaps one of her characters could find something magical left by the waves. She crossed a field where a woman in a singlet and equally enormous shorts was competing at inertia with her breathless dog. A shady path led alongside a caravan park where the immobilised vehicles were as white and silent as monuments. At the end of the path an uneven series of steps cut out of the earth and ribbed with sticks descended to the beach.
The river had withdrawn, baring an expanse of sand several hundred yards wide. Yachts crept across the estuary, beyond which the sea bristled with the crosses of a wind farm. Down here the piebald mass of clouds seemed even lower, capable of resting on the edge of the cliff as it had settled on the darkened mountains across the river. Perhaps it was the reason why the beach was unpopulated, which she ought to welcome. She didn't want anyone interrupting her thoughts.
She headed downriver. This would take her below the area where she and her cousins had camped, and perhaps where her characters would do the same. What might they see? Perhaps million-selling novelist Carlotta might think that the pebbles strewn alongside the foot of the cliff and at the water's edge resembled fairy treasure, jewels turned to stone. She would observe the green crewcuts of tussocks protruding from mud exposed by the tide and wonder what species of heads was buried there. Ellen found the notion disconcerting, and tried to concentrate on how Roy, an artist garlanded with awards, saw the beach. Besides noticing that the sand retained the forms of waves, he might well reflect that the countless scattered shells were tomorrow's sand, along with those patches of cliff that weren't protected by foliage. Indeed, a breeze was troubling the bushes in their sleep, and Ellen thought she glimpsed windblown sand catching on shells ahead. Could care-home owner Helen spot an object glistening, no, glittering among the pebbles? It might have fallen out of an eroded section of the cliff, but Ellen found that she preferred to locate it by the water, where a wave could rearrange the delicate chain of some unfamiliar and unusually luminous metal into a shape like a magical symbol. By rescuing it Helen would discover that a pebble was attached to it, or rather that a perfectly globular stone was – a stone so uncommon that you could gaze into its depths and never name the visions it brought to mind. 'Have that to show your children,' Helen might say to Hugo, British Headmaster of the Year, as she passed him the charm.
Had Ellen said the line of dialogue aloud? She had to glance over her shoulder to confirm she couldn't have been overheard, but she ought to be concerned about the way her book was reshaping itself. The characters hardly sounded like people who would camp out on a cliff. They would have to be friends who met at weekends for a bracing walk of the kind she could do with taking more often. Roy and Carlotta would need to handle the magic stone before Hugo accepted it on his pupils' behalf. What effect did it have on the friends? Perhaps it granted each of them their deepest wish – so deep that none of them had ever put theirs into words. Or might they not be wishes, the unadmitted feelings that became altogether too real? She was driven to tramp faster, as much as the soft sand allowed, but she couldn't outdistance the idea. She felt as if her imagination were in danger of lifting a lid on it, calling it up from the dark.
What might her characters wish for? Hugo would be anxious for his pupils to behave, which meant he might secretly dream that they did exactly as they were told. Roy's dream could be that any work he imagined, no matter how impossible it seemed, would become real in every smallest detail. As for Carlotta, what would a writer dream other than to write the most successful book of all time? Helen's dream had to be that all the old folk in her care would stay healthy for the rest of their considerable lives. So much for the wishes, but how would they go wrong?
Hugo's pupils might grow absolutely obedient, unable to act without his direction, inside or outside the school. How unremittingly responsible for them would that make him? Carlotta's book would be so successful that everyone she met insisted on questioning her about it, until her home and her phone and her computer were so besieged that she hadn't a moment of her own. The unnatural health of Helen's residents might suggest to their offspring that they were refusing to die, and Ellen fancied that some of the children would take matters into their own homicidal hands. As for Roy, anything he visualised would become real, including whatever he feared. How would he stop this, if indeed he could? How could any of them control elements buried so deep in their minds that they might not even be able to identify the material until it was too late?
This was certainly an unnerving notion. It even made its author uneasy, down here alone on the beach. Perhaps she should save working on it until she was home; she had more than enough to take back to her desk. She could walk faster now that she didn't have to think. If she'd had enough of the beach, the nearest escape route was up the path where Charlotte had walked in her sleep.
This put her in mind of her own dream that night, of being trapped in a house that had smelled stuffed with clay – a house as dark as the inside of a skull and yet not dark enough for her. In the dream she'd thought any of the windows would be as bad as a mirror, but she was distracted from the memory by the creaking of the cliff beside her, or rather of the shrubs that covered it. A trickle of sand emerged, presumably dislodged by the same imperceptible wind, and she veered away from the cliff. She ought to be able to walk faster on the pebbles than on the sand.
The stony trail bordered the mud at the edge of the water. The mud was as gloomily brown as the exposed clay of the cliff, and scored with ruts that she could take for scratches gouged by giant fingernails as their owner
