“It’s not one of mine,” I said. “I went to check it out. It’s a genuine MacLeish. You know I only did the two, Greta, and I’d be surprised if one of them escaped.”
“Oh, did you really?” I could hear the sarcasm coming all the way from Cockermouth. “So it’s just a great big coincidence, is it, then, you and a genuine MacLeish appearing in the Lake District at exactly the same time?”
“It’s got a provenance. It’s nothing to do with me.”
“Are you quite sure?” That teacher voice: I hated it, especially from a sister two years younger than me. Greta had had it all her life.
“Listen,” I told her. “I am not up to my old tricks. I’m earning a decent, honest, very meagre living. You just talk to my probation officer.”
“You twist her round your little finger,” Greta said.
“That’s neither true nor fair.” My probation officer had approved my frequent shifts of job and address without demur, certainly – but not because I manipulated her. She had a heavy caseload of much harder nuts than me. I was light relief.
“Sitting round in other people’s houses,” Greta said. “You think that’s a proper job?”
Phone clenched to my ear, I gazed at the basement wall, now fresh Wild Orchid, but slow to dry because I was covering the bills for my stay and dared not switch the radiators on. “Yes. I’m not just sitting here, I’m cleaning and decorating. It’s hard work.”
“You should try teaching. Then you’d know what hard work is. No, on second thoughts, you shouldn’t. You’d be totally unsuited to it.” Greta was in her second year of teaching at a primary school in Workington.
“Thanks,” I said. “Nice to have the support of my family.”
“You need someone to tell you the truth. And the truth is, Eden, you’re a fraud. I know who did that bloody painting. I’m not stupid.”
I took a swift breath, said “Goodbye, Greta,” tonelessly and slammed the phone down before I started shouting at it.
“Jesus Christ!” I yelled at the orchid wall instead. “What does she want? Blood?”
That was it. Greta wanted blood. She wanted my head on the block. I felt she’d despised me for years, and I had no idea why. We’d got on all right as children, apart from the odd attempted drowning, even though our tastes differed wildly: mine for solitude and exploring and making dens; hers for order, filling my dens with dolls which had to sit in rows and be told off. I hated dolls.
I didn’t hate Greta, though: I quite liked her, and assumed that she had once quite liked me. I didn’t know what had changed. Well, I did know. But that wasn’t any help. She was unforgiving.
I marched out of the basement, ran up to my painting room and swiftly laid out four A5 sheets of semi-rough on the dressing table. Propping my photos up against the mirror, I began to pencil in the view of Derwentwater from Cat Bells. I drew quickly, lightly, barely touching the paper where I felt more like stabbing it.
So I didn’t know what hard work was, did I? The one-woman production line. I sketched in the humps of four Castleriggs. Greta was jealous of my talent, that was her trouble. Talentless and resentful, like all teachers, because I’d been successful – for a while, at least.
My pencil ripped at one of the sheets and I screwed it up and hurled it away, then stared at the bin, breathing hard and wishing I could throw the last two years in there as well.
I was being unfair. To teachers, not to Greta. It was my art teacher who had made me believe that I was good enough for university. And so I would have been – maybe eighty years ago.
Not in the twenty-first century, though. When I got there, I hated my art course. I wanted to paint and draw, and more specifically to paint and draw from life. I wasn’t interested in installations and events and ideas. I had no ideas. I didn’t get other people’s. I decided that my co-students were all frauds, trying to produce something that fell in with fashion, blind to what they could actually see. They were fakes.
For a while I tried to fake it too. The only thing I ever did that my tutors liked was a dismantled engine that my father had discarded: I exploded the parts across a cut-up candlewick bedspread thrown out by my mother, and called it Lunatic Disenchantment. I’d jabbed my finger in the dictionary at random. The whole thing took me twenty minutes and earned my only A.
By then I’d learnt that my own stuff was no good in any case. My watercolours, unloved, grew limp and tame. It seemed my only talent was for pastiche. My tutor suggested that I had the necessary skills for the greetings card market. This was not a compliment.
It was to prove him wrong that in my third year I bundled up my out-of-hours efforts and hawked them round a few commercial art galleries, who of course didn’t want to know; and ended up in Lionel’s antiques shop.
Lionel inspected my work with care. Hmm, he said, interesting. This one looked very much like William Russell Flint. Well, yes, I was influenced, I said. I borrowed other artists’ styles, having lost confidence in my own.
Lionel asked a few questions about my background. He was small, round and waistcoated, with a pointed beard and the air of a well-read garden gnome. I liked him.
Would I consider copying a painting for a commission? he asked. For a client who didn’t want to display the real thing for insurance reasons. So I came into his shop and practised over a day or two, with Lionel looking over my shoulder. The end result was, I thought, pretty good. To show off, I then painted almost the same picture but in mirror image, with subtle adjustments – taller trees, a distant child on the left, lose the hill – so that it ended up making a different, but matching, partner to the original.
Lionel liked it. His client bought it. Lionel offered me other commissions, “in the style of.” I did them. He sold them. I never knew who to or how much for. I got a small amount for each one, but it paid the rent.
Did I wonder? Yes, of course I did.
Did I care? No. My work was being bought. It had a value: that was all I cared about. By now I was no longer a student: I had a living to earn. I waitressed in the evenings, and by day, in the run-down flat I shared with Nick, I painted. Nick was out at work, creating storyboards for an advertising agency. I was painting early twentieth century watercolours, in the style of little known artists, 1890’s to 1930’s, the sort of things that might fetch a couple of hundred in a saleroom on a good day but would attract no particular attention. None of them were signed: not by me, at any rate.
It was Lionel who suggested Anthony MacLeish. The perfect subject: prolific, badly-documented, given to offering paintings to his bookies to pay his gambling debts, and to anyone else in exchange for a loan: thirty years dead and with no descendants to take an interest in his estate. A cantankerous, compulsive painter of Highland landscapes and backer of bad horses. He didn’t always choose his subjects well, any more than his horses, but he had a superb way with line and shadow. He taught me a lot. In return I bulked up his body of work with some good, solid stuff.
Now I paused, sitting at the dressing table with my brush in the burnt umber. MacLeish was on the up. Was that due to me? Was it because of my paintings leaking into the market, nudging up the prices? That was a thought.
That one hanging in Latrigg Galleries: that was a top painting. Great clouds. I’m a bit of a virtuoso with clouds. I can make them look really difficult. Like a pianist playing trills: everyone says, ooh, how tricky! Tricky’s the word – it’s just sleight of hand. Russell taught me that. He had some brilliant tricks with clouds.
After a couple of years, I’d done with Antony MacLeish. We don’t want to saturate the market, Lionel had said. How about Gerwyn Holbeck? So I took him on. He was a bigger name already; he would command a higher price tag.
And that was my undoing. Holbeck had a mannered, idiosyncratic style, harder to fake than MacLeish’s, and because of his higher profile, subject to a lot more scrutiny. I thought my Holbecks were fine. They weren’t. The fraud squad got a tip-off from an auctioneer, and came to see Lionel; and Lionel shopped m
e.
I couldn’t blame him, really. He had to give them something. It turned out he had a lot at stake: apparently a fair number of his antiques weren’t the real deal either. And there was a whole lot more money tied up in them than in my paintings.
I was, I think, his only artist, an opportunist sideline that came to grief – but when they pulled me in, a whole, long, teeming, tangled catch of dodgy furniture and shady dealers was trawled in after me. So I was Lionel’s plea bargain, his hope for a shorter sentence.
But suddenly I found myself slipping into a muddy, desperate world of endless and terrifyingly quiet police interviews and faintly contemptuous lawyers, which finally ended in an eighteen month sentence and the words I’d thought existed only in bad movies: Take Her Down.
The worst thing was telling my parents. Telling my mum that I’d been charged: that killed me. My throat closed up. I could hardly get the words out. I had to repeat it all three times, painfully, because she wouldn’t, couldn’t understand.
“You’ve been what? You’ve been doing what?” she said. My mum was as straight and tough and undistracted as a Roman road. She valued hard work and had worked hard all her life. She was appalled, and Greta lined up right behind her.
My father was more sympathetic. Whatever you’ve done, he said, you’re still our daughter. In truth, he wasn’t all that bothered. Not a deep man, my dad, but kindly enough when he remembered to be. My brother Allen, like him, was inclined to say Silly girl, hard luck.
And then there was Nick – no, I couldn’t even bring myself to think about Nick. Back to my mother.
Appalled as she was, my mum set out to make the best of things. She was the one who visited me in prison, who offered sensible advice, who made it plain she would forgive me if I straightened myself out.
Greta never would. She was never going to forgive me anything. Yet I wasn’t that bad, was I? Not everybody thought I was that bad. Isaac approved of me. Selena admired me. She admired my paintings, anyway. And while fishing her out of the lake was hardly a heroic act, surely a bad person would have left her there to flounder?
A bad person wouldn’t have taken her home and put her in the bath. They would have turned her straight over to the police. No, maybe that was what a good person would have done. An ultra-good person, like Greta, not a normal person like me.
Normal? I was kidding myself. A normal person would have left her to the police. Although I’d thought I was acting like a nice, kind, normal person, I wasn’t any of those things. I’d taken her in because she breathed Jail to me; because of that familiar sad waywardness.
Cat Bells wasn’t working. Greta had ruined my Sunday morning. I couldn’t concentrate: I needed to get out. Rinsing my brushes, I left the dark washes of Derwentwater to dry while I returned to the phone.
I’d never rung Griff and Muriel as I’d promised. Now I hunted round the kitchen until I found Muriel’s slip of paper, and rang the number neatly printed on it.
Muriel answered, her Edinburgh accent as crisp and clean as a new shirt. “Eden! How good of you to get in touch!” It sounded genuine. Somebody believed my act, then. “How did things go the other evening? How is Selena?”
“She seemed to be okay,” I said. “She stayed here overnight, and then I took her to the police station next day and they drove her home.”
“Was it close?”
“It was a farm in Little Langdale. I’ve arranged to go over there and see her again. I’m meant to be painting her portrait, would you believe?” Prompted by Muriel, who said all the interested, encouraging things that Greta wouldn’t, I described the visit to the Staithwaites’ farm.
“I’m glad she seems to have recovered,” Muriel said. “And you? How are you? Did you suffer any ill-effects from your soaking?”
“No, I’m fine. I’m made of tough stuff.”
“Eden?” She hesitated. “Would you like to meet up with us? It would be very nice to see you again.”
“Sure,” I said, agreeably surprised. “But are you still in the Lakes? Weren’t you packing? I thought you’d be back home by now.”
“No, we’re still here. I feel rather guilty about leaving you to deal with Selena on your own. We’re going into Bowness shortly. Why don’t you join us, and we’ll take you out to lunch?”
“That would be good,” I said, gratified. Although I wasn’t keen on Bowness, a free lunch was always welcome.
“Can you meet us at Waterhead Pier in half an hour? We’re going to take the boat,” said Muriel, “and cruise down the lake to Bowness.”
I pulled a face. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have agreed so readily – partly because of my dislike of boats, but also because I didn’t know the pair of them well enough to spend that long together. I foresaw two hours of politely shivering, wind-whipped boredom ahead. However, it was too late to back out now.
Down at Waterhead Pier, I spotted Griff and Muriel immediately, although they didn’t appear to see me or maybe didn’t recognise me with my hair dry and bouncing around in all the annoyingly wrong directions. I went up to them and said Hallo.
Muriel was digging in her handbag. Griff said Hallo back, with a faint, polite note of enquiry. No recognition. Had I somehow got the wrong couple? Surely I couldn’t be mistaken, for they wore the matching green coats, and I remembered Griff’s gaunt, amiable, intelligent face, like a don escaped from the library. I was having a surreal moment of doubt when Muriel looked up and to my relief said,
“Hallo there, Eden! Nice to see you.”
“Well, Eden!” said Griff, instantly all smiles. “And how are you?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
“Let me just go and get a timetable,” said Muriel, and she walked off towards the hut.
Griff rubbed his hands. “So! And all the, er, family are well?”
“My family? Yes, they’re fine, thanks. How about you? Have you had a good weekend?”
Griff looked blank for a moment. Then he glanced at the rucksack sitting on the ground beside him, and his face cleared. “Oh, excellent! We’ve been up Loughrigg. I know a lot of people don’t rate it too highly but it’s always been a favourite of mine.”
“People have mountain snobbery,” I said. “It’s a beautiful day for it.”
“Yes, fantastic. A little boggy underfoot, though,” said Griff ruefully, as Muriel returned.
“You remember Eden, don’t you, Griff?” she said.
“Of course I do! How could I forget a name like that?”
“It is unusual,” I admitted. “My parents named all three of us after rivers. My brother’s Allen and my sister’s Greta.” When Greta used to moan about it, I told her to be thankful she hadn’t ended up as Ribble or Nidd.
“Eden was there with us when that other young lady got into trouble, you remember, Griff,” said Muriel.
On Griff’s face, utter confusion. Blankness, almost terror.
“Into trouble,” he repeated.
“The young lady who went swimming in the lake just over there the other evening. Eden had to go in and pull her out. We lent a hand,” supplied Muriel.
“Oh, yes! Yes!” His face creased into a broad smile. “Poor young lady! But what a thing to do. Fancy going swimming at this time of year!”
“What month is it, Griff?” asked Muriel, very quietly.
“Well…” His eyes strayed aside: to my puffa jacket, to a nearby couple wearing woolly hats, to the trees by the road, newly frilled with lime-green trim. “It’s… not very warm for spring yet, is it? We used to go swimming in Coniston Water when the children were small. Not sure I’d do it now, even in August.” He gave a mock shiver.
“Too true,” I said, the surreal feeling creeping over me again. I wondered if my face showed the same confusion that Griff’s just had.
“Would you go and buy the tickets for us, Griff?” asked Muriel. “Three for the red cruise.” Griff went off, muttering three for the red cruise, three for the red cruise.
Muriel looked up
at me. An unremarkable, cheerful, competent face. “Memory loss,” she said.
“Oh. I did wonder...”
“He had viral encephalitis two years ago and it practically destroyed his short term memory. His long-term memory is still intact, for the most part anyway, right up to a few weeks before he fell ill: then everything stops. There’s just a ten to fifteen-minute window since.”
“Window?”
“That’s how long he can remember things for. Less if he gets distracted.”
I gazed at Griff, talking at the counter. He looked perfectly normal. “Oh my God, how very–”
“Yes, it’s disconcerting,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn you, Eden, and just walked off like that. But I wanted to see if he would recognise your face. I wondered if he would remember anything about Selena’s rescue, with it having been such a dramatic event. I hoped that being back here at Waterhead might jolt his memory into action. I do keep hoping these things, though so far I’ve been disappointed.”
“Well, he did seem to remember something.”
Muriel shook her head decidedly. “No, he just picked up on what I said. He pretends, or he thinks he remembers when he doesn’t. It was a forlorn hope, really. But worth a try.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“It’s called anterograde amnesia. With a degree of retrograde amnesia. The neurologist is encouraging, but he’ll never recover his full memory.”
“What’s that, Muriel?” asked Griff, returning to us.
“I was telling Eden about your illness. Do you remember your illness, Griff? When you had to go into hospital?”
His forehead creased. “What, when I broke my ankle?”
“No, after that. Your encephalitis. When you lost your memory.”
Griff scratched his thinning hair. “Vaguely. All a bit of a blur, you know. It happened so fast…”
“Of course,” I said.
“But none the worse for wear. I’m right as rain now. And here we are on holiday,” said Griff. He beamed around at the rucksack and woolly hats.
“A long holiday,” added Muriel, her smile echoing his.
We lined up to climb aboard the launch. Griff wanted to sit on the outside seats, which were hard and damp, and too close to the side for my liking.
Even though I knew it was perfectly safe, I felt my stomach do its slow roll as it always did on a boat. The sky above us was as clear as sapphire, and the air still: but I was aware that once we were out on the lake a cold wind would leap from nowhere like an unruly poltergeist to torment us. Muriel donned a Peruvian hat with ear-flaps, an overgrown baby’s bonnet.
“Tell us about yourself, Eden,” she said as we huddled on the austere seats. “Do you come from round here?”
“I lived in Ambleside till I was eight.” In the bright myth of my childhood, Ambleside was my true home: only now it felt alien, offering no comfort.
“And how long have you been a house-sitter?”
“Just a few months. It gives me time to paint: I do water-colours for sale to tourists. That’s one of my best-selling views,” I added, pointing towards the Langdales.
“And one of my favourites!” Griff exclaimed. “We’ve been coming here for so many years, it’s like a second home, isn’t it, Muriel?”
She patted his hand with her gloved one. As we chugged away, Griff began to give a running commentary on the landmarks that we passed. He knew more of them than I did: I’d never heard of Bee Holme or Pinstones Point. He was knowledgeable and enthusiastic, almost childlike in his excitement.
“It’s fine here,” said Muriel to me, “because the scenery is so familiar. It just carries him along, like a lifeline. It provides a continuous thread to follow.”
“What’s that, dear?”
“It’s fine here today,” said Muriel. “Lovely weather. What’s the name of that promontory?”
“That’s Ecclerigg,” said Griff.
“He knows them all.”
“Not all,” said Griff modestly. “My memory’s not what it was, I’m well aware, but I fancy I do have a good head for maps.”
Five minutes later, when his commentary tailed off in a look of vague bewilderment, she promptly began one of her own: what a nice day for March, we should reach Bowness just in time for lunch, and seeing as we had sandwiches yesterday after that nice walk by Grasmere, what about a nice hot lunch today? Our young friend Eden might like the Red Squirrel Café, always nice on a Sunday.
Beneath the garnish of niceness, the meat became evident: she was giving Griff a context. He grew happy again.
I wasn’t so happy. I was conscious that I should be spending that rare jewel-like day in painting, not sitting on a boat making small-talk and trying to ignore the sloshing proximity of deep water. By the time we disembarked, my stomach was churning like the waves.
And I didn’t care for Bowness, a muted, middle-class Blackpool – but a genteel, insipid, watercolour version instead of the lively, brash McGill of the real thing. The shops were awash with china pigs and stuffed rabbits. My mood wasn’t improved when I stopped at Tiggywinkles, one of my few outlets, and discovered that my cards had been removed from the window display and replaced with more bloody cartoon sheep.
Throughout this, Griff was genial and friendly. He took his cue from Muriel, who addressed me by name rather more than would be expected. Only occasionally did I catch him glancing at me with puzzlement and unease, until Muriel made some comment about our young friend Eden and all was well again.
In the café, they had an unidentifiable meat pie and chips.
“We don’t cook on holiday,” said Griff, “it’s not fair on Muriel.”
“Are you staying here for long?”
“Another week,” he said. “Work beckons, you know.”
“What do you do?” I wondered how he could manage to hold down a job.
Griff’s face clouded. “Oh, local government finance. You know, endless paperwork and general rubbish.”
“My brother Allen’s in the same line,” I said. The sort of office job Nick and I had always agreed on despising, until Nick went and bought his suit without consultation and began applying to advertising agencies.
“But you’re planning to take early retirement, aren’t you, Griff?” prompted Muriel.
“That would be nice. But there’s no point in my retiring before you do. Muriel’s an FE lecturer in catering,” said Griff with fond pride. “So no cooking on holiday, eh, Muriel? This is your time to switch off!”
I thought a catering lecturer should have had something to say about that pallid pie. I couldn’t face it. I had a vegetarian panini in deference to my uneasy stomach, and ate it too quickly, which meant I had no excuse for not answering Muriel’s innocent questions about my past but had to skate uncomfortably around the great black hole of Jail that kept cracking open in front of me. So when I noticed the computer in the corner, I made grateful excuses and went to check my email.
Pointless, really. Since I’d taken myself off Facebook, the only person who ever contacted me was my old school friend Stephanie. I kept hoping for a message from Nick, or even third-hand news about him, just a crumb; but it never happened. My university friends had ceased to talk to me or did so in such guarded terms that I’d let the correspondence drop. If I’d been caught dealing E’s it would have been different, they wouldn’t have minded: but there was something about fraud and forgery, it seemed, that turned people away.
Only Steph – kind, thoughtful and determinedly Christian – told me she was praying for me and sent me regular updates on her baby. Today there was a picture of him trying to eat his own feet.
I emailed back my admiration. As I returned to the table a surge of depression broke over me at the sight of the grey heads of my ersatz friends. I told myself sternly that I was lucky to have anyone to buy me lunch.
“There’s still ten minutes on the computer if you want,” I offered.
“Ten minutes?” Griff
looked blank.
“I bought twenty. So feel free if you want to use the internet.”
He stared. “What for? Why would I want to do that?”
“Well, in case you want to look something up.”
“Who sent you? What are you doing here?” His voice was rising, but Muriel said composedly,
“Hush, Griff. Eden is a friend. She’s come to have lunch with us.”
“Oh!” He subsided doubtfully, looking at his plate. “Lunch? I’m afraid we’ve almost finished! If I’d known you were joining us…” He glanced at Muriel reproachfully before handing me the menu. “What would you like?”
“No, just a coffee, thanks,” I said.
It was back to the starting blocks of the conversation. The introductions and polite chitchat had to be endured all over again. I was glad to finish and get back to the ferry, to be ambushed by the chilly wind.
There, huddled on the deck, I listened to Griff’s exuberant exposition of the landmarks in reverse. Watching the yachts and dinghies bobbing across the grey water, I was trying not to imagine being on one, when I realised that Griff’s voice had wound down and he was again looking at me with puzzlement.
“Eden, Griff,” said Muriel. “Eden is a painter. Do you paint boats at all, Eden?”
“Not in any detail.” Boats were just highlights, a quick way to introduce a dab of colour. Would yacht-owners buy portraits of their property, I wondered, like racehorse owners did? The ferry-riders were a bigger group. “Maybe I could paint this launch,” I mused. “Would you buy a watercolour of a launch?”
She laughed. “If it was good enough. We like watercolours, don’t we, Griff?”
“I wonder if the ferry company would mind,” I said. “Do you think a boat could be copyright?”
“I don’t see how they could object,” said Muriel, pulling her coat more tightly round her.
“Well, I’d hate to break any laws.” I paused, irresolute, wondering if this was the time to take the plunge and tell them about my conviction. I wasn’t likely to get a better lead-in.
My nerve failed me. They didn’t need to know, and anyway Griff would never remember. He was looking at me oddly enough as it was.
“Break laws? What laws?”
“You know, trying to make money out of pictures that were illegal…” I faltered.
“Illegal?” said Griff, staring. “I have no knowledge of that at all. Why are you asking? What’s it got to do with you?” His hands curled around the edge of his seat.
“What’s that hill called over there?” said Muriel.
Griff looked. “That’s Wansfell Pike. You know that, Muriel. We’ve climbed it several times. Don’t you remember?”
“I’d just forgotten the name. Did you do your Wainwright notes for that climb? I know you wrote up the walk over the top to Troutbeck.”
“Oh, yes! I was reading through my notes for Troutbeck just last week.”
Muriel leaned forward to me. “Griff is a great admirer of Wainwright’s guides,” she said. “He’s been compiling his own set of walking books in the same style. With notes on each walk, the little pen and ink drawings, maps, everything. They’re delightful.”
“Not in the same league as Wainwright, of course,” said Griff ruefully. He lifted his hands from the seat, flexed them and cracked his knuckles. “He’s inimitable. My drawings aren’t half as good as his.”
“I think they’re very good, Griff! Perhaps you should let Eden judge. Eden is a professional artist, you know. Do you remember,” added Muriel, “Eden was painting when we first met her? It was at Waterhead, over there.” She pointed at the approaching shore. “We’d just walked down from Jenkin Crag.”
“Oh, yes! I remember.”
“That was the day we saw Selena,” I put in, “the girl who fell into the lake.”
“Who what? What girl?”
“Never mind, Griff,” said Muriel.
“The Lady of the Lake, you called her,” I said.
“Oh yes! I remember her. Like a drowned rat!” His face lit up. “Goodness me! I remember the Lady of the Lake all right. That long coat was so wet, wasn’t it? Wet right through! My word.”
Muriel took a sharp inward breath, staring at him.
“What happened that day, Griff?” she said faintly.
“Well, don’t you remember her? The young lady standing up in her wet coat. Looking at us with her long hair all wet. The Lady of the Lake! I can see her face now. She fell in, did you say? Is she all right?”
“She’s fine,” I said. Muriel gazed at Griff with a stunned, dazzled face, as if he were a revelation; an angel.
“She didn’t catch cold?” he queried.
“No, she seemed to be okay,” I said. “We took her back to her home.”
“Where’s that?” he asked eagerly.
“It’s a farm over towards Little Langdale, a bit off the beaten track. It’s a very lovely setting.”
“Eden!” Muriel addressed me earnestly. Her face was flushed, her hair disordered by the breeze. “You said you’d be going back soon to paint her. I don’t suppose – could we come too? Do you think Selena would mind? I really would like us to meet her again.”
I understood why: she needed to know if Selena would stir Griff’s memory to further wakefulness. Thinking about it, I couldn’t see any reason for Selena to object. She’d probably appreciate their interest.
“I should think that would be okay,” I said.
“We can give you a lift to the farm – that might make things easier for you too. It would be lovely to visit Little Langdale, and see Selena, wouldn’t it, Griff? The Lady of the Lake?”
“Absolutely!”
Ambleside was pulling slowly closer, winding us in to shore. Griff began to rearrange his rucksack comprehensively, taking everything out with some surprise before replacing it, while Muriel sat very still and studied him as if he were an abstract painting in a gallery and she the viewer, looking for clues to meaning. When she finally turned back to me, her face was dazed.
“This could be the beginning of something. Thank you so much for coming with us. I do look forward to seeing you again soon,” she said.
Griff shook my hand heartily in his firm grip. “A pleasure! Give our regards to everyone at home. Goodbye, er…”
“Eden.”
“Eden!” He struck his forehead in mock self-castigation. “How could I forget a name like that?”
Chapter Six