‘I’m fine,’ she croaked unconvincingly. ‘Go away.’
At least she’s conscious, thought Lorna. ‘We’ll go away, just as soon as we’ve made sure you’re all right,’ she offered. ‘Then we’ll both bugger off. How about that?’
The old lady’s response was lost in more barking as the dog returned to the door to see off the intruders.
She stood up and dumped her bag on the step. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘You mind that, I’m going round the back.’
‘What?’ Keir had got his phone out, dithering over whom to call.
‘There’s often a way in through the back door. I used to walk a Jack Russell for an old lady who kept a set of keys in the peg bag on her washing line. Don’t ask,’ she added in one breath. ‘You stay there and keep an eye on her, keep her talking.’
She set off to the sound of Keir calling through the letterbox in the sort of ‘old dodderer’ tones Joyce would find most annoying. It would, Lorna suspected, irritate her enough to distract her from any pain.
As she’d hoped, the back door of Rooks Hall was easily accessible. The back garden was as wild as the front, but it led out towards open fields and a copse that was probably swarming with rabbits. There was a large shed at the bottom of the garden – that must be her studio, she thought. What a view.
Now wasn’t the time for that, though. She looked around. Where would you hide a key? No peg bag, no plant pot, no ‘discreet’ metal acorn …
Lorna’s eye fell on an old Lyon’s Golden Syrup tin, placed not quite unobtrusively enough by the back step. Sure enough, inside was a set of keys, and she wasted no time in unlocking the door and letting herself in.
‘Hello?’ she called as soon as she was inside. ‘Mrs Rothery, it’s Lorna, from outside.’ The kitchen smelled musty, of old teabags and dried dog food, but it was light, with a stripy roller blind over a big window that framed a perfect landscape view of the hills and with an original starburst clock over the cooker. It was neat and tidy, not quite what she’d have expected from an artist who painted wildernesses in emotional colours.
Don’t be nosy, thought Lorna, but she couldn’t help taking in the details of a solitary life: the mini tin of beans, the pillboxes, the empty calendar, the decades old fabric fading on the kitchen chair seats, geometric silver and spearmint. The single mug in the sink.
She made her way to the door that led, she guessed, into the hall. The dog was pelting back and forth, barking at Keir at the front, then back to the kitchen door, and she opened it carefully. Still, Lorna managed to clunk the terrier’s head by accident with the door as she let herself in. It let out a yelp and carried on barking.
The hall was dark, with framed paintings on the red walls and monochrome tiling on the floor. And lying in the middle of it, under a fallen table, was Joyce Rothery.
‘For God’s sake,’ she croaked as Lorna crouched beside her. ‘Make it stop.’
Lorna lifted up the table and set it back against the wall. ‘Make what stop? The pain? Are you in pain?’
‘No, Keir.’ She flapped her hand towards the letterbox. ‘Make him stop. Telling me to “breathe through the pain”, and what have you. I’m not soft in the head or giving birth. I know how to breathe .’
The letterbox clattered. ‘I’m only trying to help.’ Keir sounded hurt.
‘He’s only trying to help,’ said Lorna, diplomatically. ‘But men often say useless things at times of crisis. Can you sit up? Do you think you’ve broken anything?’
‘I heard that,’ Keir huffed. ‘But carry on.’
‘Good of you.’ Joyce huffed with effort as Lorna tentatively guided her into a sitting position. She was small but strong under the loose blue tunic, not quite the bird-like frail thing Lorna had expected from the view she’d had through the letterbox. ‘Ouch! I’ve bruised something, I’d say. But nothing worse,’ she added. ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Can you move your fingers? And your toes?’ The hands were arthritic, but didn’t seem as if anything was broken. Lorna checked Joyce’s eyes for signs of concussion. ‘Sorry for staring,’ she went on, ‘I’ve done a First Aid course.’
The beady eyes were taking in every detail of Lorna’s face in return, not caring if the inspection made her uncomfortable. Joyce was a handsome woman, rather than a pretty one: she had a strong nose, clear blue eyes and high, solid cheekbones. She wore her years like the long turquoise pendant round her neck – proudly. ‘I don’t care for being stared at like that. It makes me wonder if you’re one of those loony religious types. Or if I’ve got lipstick on my teeth.’
Lorna tried not to react. At least this proved there was nothing much wrong with Joyce, other than a bit of shock.
‘Shall I call an ambulance?’ Keir called through the letterbox. His eyes were just visible, his eyebrows beetling with concern.
‘Why?’ Joyce called, scornfully. ‘Are you worried you’re going to get into trouble with your boss?’
‘No! I’m concerned about you, Mrs R. You’re very hard to take care of.’
‘Did you just call me Mrs R? You impertinent child.’
Lorna stifled a smile.
‘I suggest you go and spend your time and effort on people who need care,’ Joyce went on. She looked at Lorna. ‘Quite outrageous.’
‘Should I let him in?’ she asked. ‘He does need to see you.’
Joyce huffed, and then she dropped her voice. ‘I’m perfectly all right, young lady,’ she said. ‘I have no desire to be “on the radar” for these people. How would you like some do-gooder trying to tell you how to live in your home?’
She looked Lorna straight in the eye, with a frankness that Lorna recognised from other supposedly old dodderers who had held very firm views on how they intended to depart this life. Betty, for one. She knew better than to argue with it.
‘Then let him in and he can report you’re fine,’ she replied, under her breath. ‘Why don’t I take Bernard for a quick walk? Then when I come back, I’ll insist Keir leaves with me.’
Joyce Rothery was a hard woman to help, but she was smart enough to know a deal when she saw one.
‘Don’t be longer than ten minutes,’ she said. ‘And don’t let him loose. There’s a lead by the front door.’
‘Well, I take my hat off to you,’ said Mary when Lorna returned triumphantly a few hours later. ‘You’ve succeeded where the great Mayor Barry Williams failed. You’ve entered the house of Joyce Rothery.’
Lorna unclipped Rudy’s lead from his harness and let him trot over to the desk, where he flopped in the basket Mary had brought in from home. Keith hadn’t let her replace Fudge their cocker spaniel as ‘it was a tie’ and she said she wanted to make Rudy feel as welcome as Lorna. ‘I wouldn’t go that far. We didn’t even talk about her art. I just walked her dog up the lane, she instructed me to call her Mrs Rothery, not Joyce, and I said I’d pop back over the weekend to take Bernard out again.’
‘Bernard?’
‘Her Border terrier.’
Mary raised her eyebrows. ‘So now you’re her dog walker. I suppose that’s one angle we didn’t try – and it would be a nice outing for Rudy. How did he cope?’
‘Rudy stayed in the car. I’m not sure he’s ready for Bernard just yet.’ Lorna couldn’t help feeling torn about that. The social worker, Keir, definitely seemed to think she was someone else, someone who was supposed to be walking Mrs Rothery’s dog, and she hadn’t exactly put him straight about it. Well, no. She hadn’t put him straight at all . Her conscience pricked her. Should she? His card was in her jacket pocket.
But what then? He’d get in touch with the right person, and she’d lose her chance to gain Joyce Rothery’s trust. Lorna already had a mental image of them bonding over their favourite artists, the dogs snoring at their feet by the fire. Hmm, the dogs. Putting aside Joyce’s own prickliness, it would take a bit of work to get Rudy and Bernard to make friends – from the growling Rudy had set up in the car, she’d decided it would be safer to walk Bernard
up the lane on his own – for now. But maybe a feisty pal was exactly what timid Rudy needed, she argued.
Plus, if Lorna was honest, she didn’t want to come clean. Keir looked the type to be powerfully disappointed, and Joyce would think she was a complete chancer.
‘So what happened while I was out?’ she asked instead.
‘Belinda Shapiro dropped off some more of her painted wine glasses.’ Mary pulled her lower lip wide, exposing her lower dentures in a show of awkwardness. ‘Sorry. I said you’d have them. I find it very hard to say no to Belinda.’
‘How many painted wine glasses have you sold?’ Lorna racked her brains for Belinda Shapiro in the sale lists she’d seen. The name didn’t ring a bell. She couldn’t remember seeing any wine glasses either, painted or otherwise.
‘What, ever?’
‘Yes, ever.’
Mary looked evasive. ‘Well … You know that big box in the stockroom upstairs?’
The pair of them looked round the empty gallery, and the yellow sheep’s eyes stared back. If the wine glasses weren’t on display to leaven the barnyard domination, Lorna concluded, they must be very, very bad.
‘Oh, Calum Hardy called too,’ said Mary, hastily changing the subject. ‘He wants to come round to interview you for the local paper about your plans for the gallery. And Art Week. And of course, yourself.’
‘When?’ asked Lorna.
Mary looked apologetic. ‘Um … early next week?’
‘Great!’ Deadlines were good. There was a lot you could achieve in a few days, she told herself.
Later that evening, Lorna lay flat on her back on the brand-new yoga mat and stared at the blank canvas leaning by the fireplace in the biggest spare bedroom. She’d decided this room was going to be kept empty for yoga and ‘mindfulness’ – and maybe some artistic inspiration floating up from the gallery below.
But instead, she felt overwhelmed. How did artists know where to start? How did they summon up the courage to make the first mark on that perfect whiteness? What did it feel like to have that finished version in your mind, and believe you could bring it out for everyone to see? Her course had focused on traditional life drawing, and it had taken Lorna hours to start a single piece – she’d fiddled around getting her pencils exactly right, the light, the angles, while everyone else was sketching away, their vision taking shape on the paper like stop-motion animation. There’d been no excuses: the best teachers, the perfect light, no pressure, as much inspiration in the beautiful Italian countryside as anyone could ask for.
And yet there’d been nothing harder in that whole pointless year than the starting. Once the first stroke was down, Lorna had known she’d never be able to transmit what she saw in her mind’s eye. Creativity, she’d come to realise, was an instinct that threw out ideas like sparklers, a unique filter only you saw the world through, whatever you wanted to call it. Her mum had it – her mum was made of creativity – but Lorna didn’t have it, or the confidence to fake it.
She sighed and turned her head, so she could look out into the night sky and the stars caught in the neat grid of the sash windowpanes. They were beautiful old windows. The darkness outside made her feel weightless and free, as if she could float away out into the night, over the hills and up beyond the glittering heavens. In the half-light of the silent room, without anyone there to tell her who Lorna Larkham had been or should be, Lorna closed her eyes and willed the secret hopes and wishes and dreams that had to be hidden inside her flow out with each breath.
This room might show her a way to be creative. If not drawing classically like her mum, then maybe collage? Or sculpture? Or abstracts?
Nothing came. No flash, no spark. Nothing.
For God’s sake. What was wrong with her? Here she was, her heart empty and open, in a place full of memories, in her own space for the first time, alone but with everything in front of her. Surely that sort of infinite possibility, that sort of fear , had to spark something?
But it didn’t. Lorna only felt numb, and a bit thirsty.
‘Bollocks,’ she muttered, and got up to make another cup of tea.
Chapter Five
Driving towards Much Yarley again on Sunday morning, braced with some ideas from the internet about helping anxious dogs make new friends, Lorna started to feel a strange sense of déjà vu. Some of the landmarks seemed familiar but she wasn’t sure whether it was because she recognised them from the previous visit, now she wasn’t focused on the satnav, or from her childhood.
She and Jess hadn’t had a particularly active social life – or rather, she hadn’t. From more or less the moment they’d moved to the town, Jess had been glued to Ryan Prothero’s side, and Lorna had tagged along, but not every time because there were limits to even her boredom threshold. It was worse when Ryan turned seventeen, and acquired his first car. Sitting in the back of his Renault Clio listening to Ryan and Jess run through their extensive list of soppy pet names while driving laps of Longhampton’s one-way system was awkward . No wonder she’d preferred to spend her weekends in the library, or Longhampton’s perfunctory town museum, or doing the loop of the shops, avoiding the Goths by the war memorial.
Every so often, Dad would bung Jess a tenner to take Lorna along to one of Ryan’s Young Farmers’ Club events. Strictly speaking, Ryan wasn’t a young farmer – his dad had a farm-machinery business which kept both Protheros in matching Range Rovers – but his best mate Sam ‘Ozzy’ Osborne was a fifth-generation son of the soil, and that gave them all access to an active social calendar of ploughing matches and discos in barns, sometimes with a chicken or two wandering through during the slow dances.
Lorna wondered if Much Yarley was where Ozzy’s dad’s farm had been as she passed a field of cows. It rang a faint bell. They definitely had cows, she remembered that, because of the secret Ozzy had confided in her, in the dark corner of one post-ploughing-match disco. He’d told her that he was glad his brother Gabe (“Big Ozzy”) was going to inherit the farm, because the thought of raising cows, just to slaughter them, made him sick. Ozzy’s sweet cider breath had been hot against her ear as he leaned in close so no one would hear him, and Lorna’s stomach had flipped first because the Lynx-and-teenage-boy smell of his shirt was so exotic, and then because she realised he’d just shared something very secret indeed. Lorna knew next to nothing about farming but even she knew Ozzy’s dad would go ballistic at the idea of his son getting all vegetarian about the cows.
Lorna had a secret too, but one she didn’t want to share: a raging crush on Ozzy that was inappropriate for a just-thirteen-year-old, given that he was seventeen, a sixth former. She hadn’t told anyone – who was there to tell? Their parents didn’t initiate conversations about that sort of thing, and Jess was prone to random acts of Big Sisterliness and might stop her seeing Ozzy – with whom she had a genuine friendship – ‘for her own good’. Her schoolfriends, the academic violin-playing types with nice hair, were sniffy about the YFC crowd, but when Lorna gazed up into Ozzy’s brown eyes, soft and trusting like the cows on the farm, her whole body glowed. Nothing, and no one, in Lorna’s life had come close to that moment. She’d felt important and warm, as if she was sitting in the sun. Trusted, and understood. And it scared her as much as it warmed her inside.
Funny how four years mattered so much then, she thought as she turned off the main road towards Rooks Hall. The next time she’d seen Ozzy had been in London, when she was just back from the humiliating experience of her art course and temping until she worked out what to do next. She’d been having a drink with her flatmate Tiffany, a student nanny whose pragmatic mum had instructed her to have one cocktail a week in an expensive bar ‘because you never know who you might meet’, and she wouldn’t have recognised Ozzy if he hadn’t given up trying to catch her eye and marched over to where she was standing. In place of the checked shirts and jeans she’d been used to, he was wearing a suit and glasses, and had had his brown curls cropped short, and when Lorna said, ‘Oh my God, Ozzy!’ he’d
looked pained and said, ‘Can you call me Sam, please?’
Sam. She’d always thought of him as Sam, even though she’d never heard Jess and Ryan use his real name. His name wasn’t even Sam: it was Samson. Big Ozzy’s real name was Gabriel. Their mother, Mrs Ozzy, was a churchwarden, like many Mrs Osbornes before her. Another little detail he’d shared, and she’d stored in her heart like pressed flowers or train tickets.
It turned out, as they shouted over the clamour in the bar, that Ozzy – Sam – had got himself a job with a property developer in Islington; he’d told her what he did, but it was noisy, and she’d been distracted by how easily he wore his new city clothes, and then distracted again by how on earth she could spin her awful year abroad. They’d had several drinks, during which time his accent came back a bit, then when he had to leave to go on somewhere else, she’d missed the moment to get his number, or even ask where he was going. A date, she’d assumed, embarrassed by her disappointment. Lorna hadn’t seen him again until her father died, and all the Osbornes were at the funeral. Kindly and solid in their church suits, Ozzy – Sam – tanned in a slightly different way to his brother Gabe, who was now working full time on the farm.
‘Ozzy was always going to leave,’ Jess had muttered as they stood in the line outside the church and shook everyone’s hands. ‘He was never going to be a farmer.’
‘I know,’ Lorna had muttered. She knew that because they’d made a promise to one another, she and Sam, one late night just before things went properly wrong.
‘If you ever come back and find me here,’ he’d said, lying back on the hay bale as they gazed up into the star-dotted night sky, ‘shoot me. I’ll do the same for you.’ He’d pretended to spit on his hand before holding it out, and she took it, and shook it, and wished she was just two years older, so maybe he would kiss her instead.