The safe house

friends and solicitors, A levels, obligations and parties and competition, sex, university, chance, pain.

We arrived at a small, austere church, little more than a box, with a single window in its grey walls and a notice outside announcing that it dated from the eighth century. It had been used as a barn, a cowshed and, according to local tradition, a storehouse for smuggled casks of wine. And please do not throw litter. I asked Finn directly if she had thought about what she was going to do. She shrugged, kicked a stone out of her path, dug her hands further into her pockets.

‘You can’t stay here, you know that. My job starts in a couple of months. And anyway, your life isn’t here.’

She muttered something.

‘What?’ I looked across at her, her face was set against the wind, sullen.

‘I said,’ she responded angrily, ‘that my life isn’t anywhere.’

‘Look, Finn…’

‘I don’t want to talk about it, OK? You’re not my mother.’

‘Talking of which,’ I said as matter-of-factly as possible, jarred by the tone of her voice, ‘my mother is arriving tomorrow for lunch.’

Finn looked up. Her face lost its mutiny.

‘What’s she like? Is she anything like you?’

‘I don’t think so.’ I stopped myself and smiled. ‘Maybe more than I like to believe. She’s more like Bobbie, perhaps. Very respectable. She hates me not being married. I think she’s embarrassed in front of her friends.’

‘Does she want you to marry Danny?’

‘God, no.’

‘Is Danny coming again soon?’

I shrugged, and we set off again, continuing the huge, slow circle that would take us home.

‘Sam? Who was Elsie’s father?’

‘A nice man,’ I replied curtly. Then I relented and shocked myself by saying something to Finn which I had said to almost nobody else. ‘He died a few months before Elsie was born. He killed himself.’

Finn said nothing. That was the only right response. I saw an opportunity.

‘You never talk about your past, Finn. I understand that. But tell me something. Tell me about something that was important to you, a person, an experience, anything.’

Finn tramped on and gave no sign that she had heard me. I worried that I might have repelled her. After a hundred yards she spoke, still walking, still looking straight ahead.

‘Did you hear how I spent last year?’

‘Someone told me you were going round South America.’

‘Yes. It all seems vague and far away now, so much so that I can hardly tell one country from another. It was a strange time for me, a kind of convalescence and a rebirth. But I do remember one time. I was in Peru and went to the Machu Picchu site which used to be something important in the Inca empire. If you’re there at the time of the full moon, you can pay seven dollars for what’s called a boleto nocturno, and you can visit the site at night. I went and looked at the Intihuatana – that’s the only stone calendar that wasn’t destroyed by the Spaniards – and I stood there in the moonlight, and I thought about light and about the way empires decay and die like people. The Inca empire is gone. The Spanish empire is gone. And as I stood there I thought about how all that survived were those ruins, the bits and pieces, and that beautiful light.’

I had never heard Finn talk like this before and I was deeply affected.

‘Finn, that’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘What made you want to tell me that now?’

‘You asked me,’ she said, and I felt the smallest chill of dismissal, unless it was just the chill of the wind blowing in off the North Sea.

As we came in sight of the house again, Finn said, ‘What are you going to cook for her?’

‘Them. Dad’s coming too. Oh, I don’t know, I’ll go to the supermarket and buy something ready-made.’

‘Can I do the lunch for you?’

‘Cook it?’

‘Yes. I’d like to. And could we invite Dr Daley as well?’

I was surprised to realize that there was a small bit of me that resented Finn’s continuing attachment to Michael Daley. It was understandable. He was a contact with normality, he was good-looking, he was the family doctor. Yet, perversely, my vanity wanted her to depend on me, even as I was hardening my resolve that she should leave within a couple of weeks.

‘I’ll ring him.’

‘And Danny?’

‘Maybe not Danny this time.’

For a brief moment, I saw Danny’s night-face, tender and stubbly and quite without his habitual daytime irony – the face I hoped that he turned only towards me – and felt a panicky lurch of desire. I didn’t even know where he was. I didn’t know if he was in London or away. What on earth was I doing in this muddy wasteland anyway, helping a fucked-up girl and losing my lover?

My uneasy feeling hung over me all day like bad weather and wouldn’t disperse even when I drove to fetch Elsie from school. She was sullen also and I tried to cheer her up by telling her how Finn and I had visited a church that in the olden days was a secret pirate store where they used to keep the treasure they had smuggled ashore from their pirate ships.

‘What treasure?’ she asked.

‘Gold crowns and pearl necklaces and silver ear-rings,’ I said. ‘And they buried them and drew a map and then the pirates signed it using their own blood.’

We returned home, Elsie determined to draw her own treasure map. Finn and I sat with mugs of coffee in the kitchen while Elsie crouched over the table, her forehead wrinkled, a little tip of tongue projecting from a corner of her mouth, using almost every colour from her box of Magic Markers. The phone rang and Linda answered it.

‘It’s for you,’ she shouted from upstairs.

‘Who is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

I huffed and picked up the phone in the living room.

‘Is that Dr Laschen?’

‘Yes, who is this?’

‘Frank Laroue. I enjoyed meeting you on Saturday and I hoped we could meet again.’

‘That would be nice,’ I said calmly, while my mind flapped in panic. ‘What would you like to do?’

‘Would you like to invite me round for tea at your new house? I always like seeing people’s houses.’

‘And your wife?’

‘My wife’s away.’

‘I’m afraid my house isn’t really in a fit state for anybody to visit at the moment. What about a drink in town?’

We agreed a date and place, and I rang off before I had a chance to change my mind. I wondered if I should tell Michael Daley but quickly dismissed the idea. I was going to go on his boat. That was enough. I owed myself some fun, and fuck Danny.

‘We’re like three pirates, aren’t we, Elsie?’ said Finn, as I returned to the kitchen. ‘Mummy and me and you.’

‘Yeah,’ said Elsie.

‘Is it finished?’

‘Yeah.’

I laughed.

‘So shall we all sign the treasure map, you and me and Finn?’

Elsie’s eyes lit up.

‘Yea-a-ah,’ she said enthusiastically.

‘So let’s find the red Magic Marker.’

‘No,’ said Elsie. ‘Blood. Sign it in blood.’

‘Elsie!’ I said sharply, glancing fearfully over at Finn. She got up and left the room. ‘Elsie, you mustn’t talk like