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- Herausgeber: Fledgling Press
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Sometimes it's terrifying, loving someone this much...For Fen Munro and her fiancé James, it is a dream come true: an escape from London to a beautiful house in the stunning Perthshire countryside. Barr Dubh house is modern, a building with no past at all. But someone walks the grounds, always dressed in lavender. Under a lichenous stone in an abandoned graveyard, a hideous secret lies buried. And at night, Fen is tormented by horrifying dreams. Someone wants Fen's happiness, and nothing is going to stop them - not even death...
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Too Near The Dead
Helen Grant
© Helen Grant 2021
The author asserts the moral right to be identified
as the author of the work in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of
Fledgling Press Ltd,
1 Milton Road West, Edinburgh, EH15 1LA
Published by Fledgling Press, 2021
Cover Design: Graeme Clarke
Print ISBN 9781912280407
eBook ISBN 9781912280414
www.fledglingpress.co.uk
For my mother, Joan
Chapter One
First, sleep so profound that it is like Death: without the smallest spark of consciousness to light the darkness, without the dimmest sense of the passage of time. I am not myself; I am nothing.
Waking is ponderous and full of resistance, like struggling in a tar pit. I am dredged up from sleep; it wants to suck me back down into itself. My eyelids are heavy – so terribly heavy. I lie there, unmoving, thinking about opening my eyes but not doing it, while the minutes ooze past, slow as syrup.
The air is warm – perhaps a little too warm. There is a stale taste to it. My mouth is dry. Awareness is beginning to return to me, like bubbles rising to the surface of dark water.
It’s normal for me to sleep on my back; I’ve always done it, ever since I was a child. But the posture I’ve been sleeping in is a strange one. I’ve been hugging myself, I think. Am I hurt in some way?
No. I’m not hugging myself, not exactly. My forearms are crossed over my sternum in an oddly formal way. My right hand is draped over the left. My fingers have a muffled feel to them, a lack of sensitivity. It takes me a few moments of rubbing my hands together to realise that I am wearing thin gloves.
Surprise finally forces my eyes open. I expect dim light. Instead there is blackness, a darkness so absolute that for an instant I think I have been struck blind. I squeeze my eyes shut, and see the tiny sparks produced by my own retinas, but when I open them again there is nothing but black.
I can feel the first stirrings of alarm. Calm down, I tell myself. It’s just very dark. There are no street lights here.
There should be something though, shouldn’t there? I open my eyes as wide as I can, straining to see some dim outline of the room, but I can’t pick out a single thing. It’s quiet, too. My own breathing, a little accelerated, is loud in my ears. There’s an oddly resonant quality to it.
Switch on the bedside lamp. That’s the obvious thing to do. I always sleep on the same side of the bed, and the lamp should be on my left. All I have to do is reach out and feel for the switch on the cord.
I start to unfold my arm to reach out, but almost immediately my elbow comes into contact with a hard surface. The bedside table and the lamp are not there. I try to make sense of this. Is it possible that I have moved around so much in my sleep that I am actually lying across the bed, pressed up against the wall? I try to stretch out with my right arm to feel the mattress beneath me. When my right elbow hits a hard surface too, I freeze.
Calm down, calm down. Just think about this.
Have I somehow rolled right off the bed during the night without waking myself up, so that I am lying jammed between the bed and the bedside cabinet? I try to wriggle in the space, to twist my shoulders, with no effect other than a crisp rustling sound. I turn my head from side to side and there is a crackle of fabric there too.
My tenuous grip on my own composure is fading fast. I can feel myself sliding towards a black pit of hysteria. Unable to move my upper body, I kick out instead and almost immediately my foot hits something. In spite of the immediate impulse to flail like a trapped animal, at some level it registers that I have shoes on. I’m not barefoot, as I undoubtedly was when I got into bed. I can tell this from the hard little knocking sound my foot makes when it strikes whatever is above it, and from the way the impact travels through my toes without causing them any actual pain.
I have an image then in my head, of a doll carefully dressed up and wrapped in tissue paper, and placed in a box. I am not a doll, but there is only one other situation I can think of in which a fully-dressed figure could be enclosed in a space like this one, and I don’t want to consider that; I am afraid I will lose all control.
Information, that is what I need. Assess the situation, like a paramedic at an accident scene. I start with my hands. The gloves are thin, and they are close-fitting. It will be difficult to draw them off in this enclosed space. I try anyway, because it is a relief to concentrate on this one small task. I have enough room to move my wrists, so eventually I manage to pull the glove off my right hand, although it turns completely inside out in the process, as though I’m skinning myself. With my bare fingers I explore the glove on my other hand. It is clearly designed for elegance rather than warmth. I can feel a little frill at the wrist, a froth of fine lace. There is a tiny button too, just to the side of the pulse point.
My bare hand creeps over my breast, exploring. I am not wearing a nightdress. Whatever I have on is far more structured than that. The fabric has a slight stiffness to it, and a satiny slipperiness, but I can also detect a very fine texture. I think it may be a heavy silk. I can feel rows of tiny pintucks running down the bodice, and over my sternum there is a long line of dainty buttons. Experimentally, I breathe in deeply and expand my chest. I can feel the grip of the dress on my body; I think it is boned. There is very little room to move my legs, but I can feel heavy skirts around them; the fabric whispers with every movement.
This is not a garment that anyone would wear to sleep in. In fact, it’s not something you would see anyone wearing nowadays except in very specific circumstances. A dress like this might pass in a costume drama, or at a very formal event – depending on the colour, perhaps a wedding.
My fingers pass over the neck of the dress and slide up my throat, snagging on a curl of hair that lies against it. Then they move up to my jaw, and then my ear, where I find a small drop earring fixed: a pearl, I think, judging from the glossy feel of it.
I can feel a crisp light fabric against the back of my hand. It’s all around my head, as though I have been packed in it.
A veil, I think. I explore further, to see what is holding it on my head, and find a headpiece made of what feel like wax flowers and berries. There is no further doubt about it. I am dressed as a bride.
I slide my hand carefully down to my breast again and then I lie perfectly still for a while. I think the thing that has prevented me losing control so far is the sheer improbability of the situation. It has to be a mistake; there has to be something I’m failing to grasp.
There is one piece of the puzzle that I don’t have yet. Still, I don’t move straight away. If there is something unthinkable to face, I want to have those last few moments of ignorance before it bursts in on me. So I lie there and listen to the sound of my own breathing, and feel the gentle motion of my chest rising and falling. The air still has that stale taste, and it seems to me that it is less refreshing than before; I have to draw in a little harder to get enough of it.
At last I put up my hand hesitantly, and test the space in front of my face. In all the time I’ve been lying here, it hasn’t got any easier to see. My eyes haven’t adjusted because there is absolutely no light. The darkness above me tells me nothing: it might go on forever, like the vast reaches of outer space.
It doesn’t, though. My fingertips meet a flat, hard surface. I let them skate over it, testing for edges, finding none. Then I put the palms of both hands against it and push as hard as I can, to no effect.
I’m breathing really hard now, sucking at what little air is left. I pound on the surface above me.
“Hey!” I shout as loudly as I can, almost deafening myself in the enclosed space. “Let me out! Let me out!”
I yell and yell until it isn’t really words any more, nor even vaguely human-sounding: it’s the sound of an animal dying in a trap. I struggle and fight but there isn’t room for anything; I only succeed in bruising my forehead on the hard surface above me.
The air is running out. I am going to die. I have been buried alive.
Chapter Two
I wake hyperventilating and slick with perspiration, my hands clenched into fists and the echo of my own screams ringing in my ears. I gasp and cough and shiver, shaking my dark hair back from my face. Tears ooze from the corners of my eyes. It is a long, long time before I am calm enough to breathe without choking or even recognise where I am. The relief of being out is intense, but all I can think about is the horror of being in. Inside the coffin. Buried.
At this moment I don’t ever want to close my eyes again. I roll onto my side and fumble for the light switch with clumsy fingers. A click, and the bedroom is illuminated with soft golden light. The room is cool and quiet. I almost wish there was some noise: traffic, music, distant sirens like I used to hear in London. But we’re a long way from the main road here, and it’s not like many cars go past at this time of night anyway.
My alarm clock shows me that it’s 03:17. I stare at it for a while. In a little over four hours it will ring, but the time between now and then stretches out like an abyss. Weary as I am, I dare not go back to sleep. What just happened didn’t feel like a dream, although I know that’s what it must have been. It felt real. In every other dream I’ve had, I could see and hear things vividly, but I’ve never been able to touch things like that, and feel them under my fingers: the crisp fabric, the polished wood. The thought of it makes me queasy.
In the end I sit up, throwing back the duvet, and slide out of bed. My robe is lying over the back of a chair. While I am putting the sleeves the right way through and sliding my arms into it and tying the belt I look around me, reassuring myself that I am really here, in my own bedroom. In our own bedroom.
It’s still too new to me to feel properly familiar. Other times, even when I haven’t had some horrible nightmare that felt too intensely real to be pure imagination, I’ve been disorientated on waking. Part of me still expects to see my old bedroom in the flat come swimming into focus around me. The window there was on my right, so the morning light always came from that side. The building was old, and the window frames didn’t fit very well, so even if there was no wind or rain to rattle them, the vibration of passing cars would do it. And of course the room was a lot smaller than this one, and crowded with shabby furniture.
This room doesn’t look lived-in, not yet. There are removers’ boxes stacked up against the walls, still sealed with tape. The walls are mirrorless and pictureless. The curtains, transferred from the flat, are too small for the big window: they barely stretch across it, and they are a couple of centimetres too short. With no rug beside the bed (I still haven’t found the box with that inside), I have to put my bare feet straight onto cold floorboards. The quiet here, the absence of city sounds, make the place feel isolated, but the loneliest thing of all is the expanse of smooth, unwrinkled sheet on the other side of the double bed.
James is in Madrid, being lionised by his Spanish publisher. He’s messaged me with photos of the reception he went to, and the chic restaurant they had dinner in, and his elegant room in the boutique hotel where they’re putting him up. He’s doing his best to make me feel included in everything, but I’m painfully aware of the fact that he’s over there, and I’m here alone. We didn’t plan it like that. A year ago, when the trip to Spain was organised, we didn’t foresee what we’d be doing now, nor where we’d be. Everything has changed since then.
I pad downstairs to the kitchen, switching on all the lights as I go. The kitchen is cold. It even smells cold. There’s a subtle but pervasive odour of something chemical – fresh paint or cleaning fluid. The expensive stainless steel range cooker has never been used, so there are no lingering smells of warm food and no residual warmth from it. There isn’t even the aroma of freshly-made filter coffee that used to hang over the kitchen of the London flat, because it’s James who is the coffee drinker, and James isn’t here. I’m strictly a tea drinker. I like my tea the colour of teak oil, very sweet, and with hardly any milk. I’d never normally drink it if I woke up in the middle of the night, because it would probably stop me getting to sleep again, but right now sleep is the last thing I want. If I could stay awake forever, I would. So I find a mug and a teabag and stand there hugging myself against the cold air and waiting for the kettle to boil. The hissing sound as the element heats the water is comforting. It’s too quiet here. Sometimes I’ll be working on something during the day and there will be a gap in the birdsong outside and the silence will be so absolute that it makes my ears ring.
Peace is a good thing, I remind myself. There is too much noise pollution in the city, the same as there’s too much light pollution. In London, I would look up at the night sky and it would be that strange opaque colour, somewhere between grey and yellow, that comes from too much artificial light. Here, you can look up and see hundreds, probably thousands, of stars, set into velvety blackness. It’s beautiful, and if it’s also a little strange, that’s just because I’m not used to it. That’s why it makes me feel a little… unsettled. It would be easier if James was here – if he was moving about the house during the day, and breathing softly beside me during the night.
The kettle boils and I move to make the tea. I deliberately avoid raising my eyes to the cupboard above the work surface. The whole kitchen is done out in charcoal grey, the doors of the drawers and cupboards finished to a high gloss so that every movement is mirrored in their murky depths. To see my own face, leaden-hued as though dead, looming up at me, is more than my nerves can stand at this moment.
It was a dream, I say to myself. Just a dream. But my hands are starting to tremble and the teaspoon rattles against the side of the mug. I can feel it again, the rising panic, the nauseating horror of being tightly closed in on all sides. The impenetrable, terrible dark. The thickness of the air, the tightening in my throat and chest. The need to scream and scream but the knowledge that it will do no good at all, because no-one can hear me.
The mug slips from my fingers and explodes on the slate floor tiles, spattering my bare legs with hot tea. I shake and shake, until my teeth chatter. I look down at the broken shards of china and the streaks of tea bursting out from the impact point, but I don’t trust myself to try clearing them up. My hands are trembling so much that I will surely cut myself to ribbons.
Instead, I step back, away from the whole mess, and then I turn my back on it and make my way tremulously across the kitchen, shoulders hunched, my legs feeling weak under me. I’m not even going to try to make more tea. There are a couple of bottles standing on the work surface – some of the first things unpacked from a box I opened at random, and not yet put away. The nearest one is a stubby brown bottle of brandy, which is not something I normally drink: I inherited it, literally. I don’t bother looking for a glass; instead I find a tin mug, which won’t break even if I drop it from a great height, and I pour a generous measure of the brandy into that. With the brandy burning a warm trail down my throat I start to feel a little better.
I don’t want to go back to bed, nor even into the bedroom. I know that’s something I’ll have to do – it would be ridiculous not to – but I’d rather wait until the sun is up and light is streaming through the window. I go through into the living room, where shrouded furniture is reflected in the plate glass windows that run from floor to ceiling. Beyond their nebulous shapes there is nothing to be seen, because there are no lights out there; there are no other houses within view of this one. In daylight I am proud of this room, of its magnificent size, but now it feels comfortless and exposed. I keep going, out through the other door, and into James’s study.
Here, there are at least curtains to draw and a high-backed armchair to curl up in, and enough of James’s things lying around that I can imagine he might walk in at any moment.
I could call him, of course. He wouldn’t be annoyed if I did, even though it must be half past three in the morning – half past four in Madrid. He keeps odd hours himself, especially when he’s nearly at the end of a book; he’s been known to get out of bed in the small hours because he can’t bear not to keep writing. I could phone him at the hotel and he’d say, “What’s up, Fen?” sounding sleepy or maybe not sleepy at all because he’d been sitting up jotting down thoughts for his next project, keeping himself awake with black coffee.
Yes, I could call him, but I’m not going to, not even for the comfort of hearing his familiar voice. What would I tell him? That’s the thing. Of all the people in the world, the last person I could tell about that horrible, claustrophobic dream, that nightmare of being closely imprisoned in my own wedding dress, is the man I am engaged to marry.
Chapter Three
I never expected to be rich. I guess I’m still not rich in the having-four-different-houses and travelling-by-private-jet and wearing-a-tiara-to-dinner sort of way. But I never thought I’d have enough money to give up my regular job for something far less secure. I never thought I’d be able to buy my own home, let alone somewhere like Barr Dubh House. I’d made my bed, and I was lying on it.
Truthfully, I didn’t expect to be getting married, either. That’s still a surprise, when I think about it.
I spent a lot of time inside James’s imagination before I ever actually met him. Editors and publicists meet the authors; copyeditors less often. I was working on someone else’s book when James’s novel hit my desk. I remember the other book was a spy thriller, which wasn’t my favourite genre to begin with, and it had had several rounds of structural edits, as a result of which the manuscript was riddled with little inconsistencies. It was also overdue, and as I worked my way through it I began to suspect that everyone involved had lost the will to do anything further with it. It was disheartening to be typing comments like “Didn’t this character die on page 21?” when I was on page 237. The whole job was so consuming at the time that I didn’t give a lot of thought to the next one until it was done.
I finished working on the spy thriller on a Friday and I downloaded James’s manuscript to look at over the weekend. I liked to read a whole work through before looking at the fine detail – except, perhaps, in the case of the spy thriller, which I would rather not have read at all. I had no particular expectations of James’s book. At that time, James Sinclair wasn’t a well-known name. I hadn’t read his debut novel, which had done tolerably well but wasn’t a bestseller.
When I got back to the place where I lived, the couple on the ground floor were having another party. Even if I’d been stone deaf, I would have known from the vibrations that ran through the building. As it was, I was glad for once that I was on the top floor, in spite of all the stairs. On the second floor, Mrs. Khan was looking out through a crack in the door. She rolled her eyes, and I grimaced back at her. We both knew that it was pointless going downstairs to complain. The party throwers would probably have turned the music up, if it were possible to turn it up any higher. I toiled my way up the last flight of stairs, let myself into the flat and closed the door behind me.
I knew it was sad to be working on a Friday night. I held out for a bit, while I made myself a plate of pasta in an unappetising sauce and ate it in front of the news. Eventually, though, I gave in. It wasn’t as though I had anything else planned, after all. I booted up my laptop and opened the file with James’s book in it.
The Unrepentant Dead, by James Sinclair – that was the title. I had a glass of red wine at my elbow and I took a sip before going any further. The title was intriguing, even if it was a bit grim. I considered it for a moment, and then I scrolled down to the beginning of the text and began to read.
If this were a romantic film, I would have read the entire book at one sitting and fallen in love with James on the spot because of his soulful prose. I didn’t read the whole book that evening, and I didn’t fall in love with James, either. But I read about a quarter of it, and when I stopped it was simply because it was too good to gorge upon. I’ve read a lot of books by anyone’s standards, both as an ordinary reader, and professionally as a copyeditor. James’s book was special. My copyeditor’s brain noted that he made very few mistakes with grammar or spelling. Of course, everyone makes a few, however careful they are, but James was very correct, which was a great relief after the last job. That wasn’t what made his book stand out though. It was such an original idea. It was based on a legend common in both Scotland and Ireland, of the sluagh, the restless dead – spirits who return to this world, flying out of the west like a flock of birds, to steal away the souls of those who are close to death. James hadn’t simply made a ghost story out of this. He had made it into an allegory for the malign influences of the past, against which his heroine struggled to assert herself. The book was tender, tragic and occasionally horrific; it was weird and beautiful. It was also a book with heart. It’s hard to explain what I mean by that. It didn’t feel as though he had tried to write what he thought would sell, or written to impress. It felt as though the author had really written his own feelings into the book.
Was I curious about the person behind this amazing book? Yes. Did I rush off and look at his website, or look to see whether he was on Twitter or Instagram? No. The truth was, the more I read of his book, the more I loved it, the less I wanted to know about James Sinclair. I’d heard enough tales from my colleagues, of authors who wrote beautiful, sensitive novels and were narcissistic monsters in real life. If James Sinclair was like that, I didn’t want to know. Nor did I want to know if he was old or hard-looking or avuncular. I had a sense of the shape of him, of his personality, through the way that he wrote, and I wanted to hang onto it, even if it was a mirage.
I read the rest of The Unrepentant Dead that weekend, finishing the bottle of wine as I did so, and on Monday morning I started again from the beginning, this time as a copyeditor. Amendments were highlighted, and any comments I added appeared to the right of the text, to remain in the file until the author had read and – hopefully – accepted the changes.
Most of the time I confined myself to the usual things: correcting typos and checking for inconsistencies. At the denouement of the story, however, I couldn’t resist commenting. This is amazing, I typed in the comments. I really meant it.
When I’d finished working on James’s book, I was straight onto the next manuscript – this time a historical romance. The author of that particular work had a persistent habit of using commas and semi-colons instead of full stops, so that reading her work was rather like listening to someone who never shut up, not even to draw breath. I didn’t give The Unrepentant Dead much thought until a number of weeks later, when it turned up in my inbox again. James and his editor had agreed on some very last minute though minor changes – I forget why – and the editor wanted me to take a final look at the manuscript.
By that time, there was not much to look at. James had accepted most of my previous amendments, so the marks showing that there was a change had nearly all vanished. The changes he had made since then were uncontroversial. Then I came to the climax of the story, where my comment, This is amazing, still remained. Underneath it was a comment in a different colour. Thank you Fen, it said.
I was illogically pleased with this simple exchange. I spent most of my working life pointing out the errors in other people’s work, so it was nice to express appreciation and be acknowledged in return. I was almost sorry to have to delete the comments and send the file off again.
The critics agreed with me about The Unrepentant Dead. It was reviewed enthusiastically, and then it won a major book prize. The prize didn’t bring a lot of money with it, but it brought literary glory. That is not to say that it propelled the book onto the bestseller list either, but it made the publisher we both worked with very eager to hang onto James: prize-winning authors brought them a lot of cachet. Suddenly there were enormous reproductions of the book’s cover all over the office. All of this meant that there was a certain amount of pressure on James to produce another book, and produce it quickly, before the momentum was lost. Never mind that it had taken him three years to write the last one.
All the same, he managed it. The next manuscript that eventually pinged into my inbox was shorter than the last one had been, and I thought that you could tell that it had been written under time pressure. There were more little inaccuracies for me to pick up. It was still brilliant, though. He had an intense, vivid style of writing – whether the scene was a cobbled city street or an expanse of moorland, he brought it to life, utterly – but he managed it deftly, without overdosing the reader with lengthy descriptions.
If, like me, you have worked for years correcting and polishing manuscripts, it’s easy to become brusque about it. There is no use pussyfooting about, after all, especially not when the deadline is looming. With James’s book, though, I did my very best to be diplomatic. I liked his writing too much to do otherwise. By the time I had finished going through the manuscript, it was bristling with red corrections and comments explaining them, but I’d added a few remarks of my own. I love this, I said of one moment of electrifying suspense, and of the redemptive scene at the end of the novel, simply: Beautiful.
I did see that manuscript again before it was published, and at first I thought all my comments had simply been removed, along with all the suggested amendments that had been accepted. The first ones certainly had. I was faintly disappointed, and then embarrassed. Perhaps I’d struck a wrong note, sounding pathetically starstruck, or perhaps my comments had simply come across as insincere, like those people whose favourite and indiscriminately-applied adjective is “incredible”. But then I came to the final scene, and underneath my comment was another one from James Sinclair: Thank you for your comments, Fen. I looked at that for a moment. When I closed my laptop, I was smiling to myself.
Several months passed, and then one afternoon when I was deeply engrossed in my work, I heard voices outside the office door. I didn’t look up. People quite often had tours around our offices – prospective interns or authors, and occasionally book bloggers. They tended to home in on the enormous shelf of free books, rather than lingering around the copyeditors’ desks.
Then someone cleared their throat right in front of my desk and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I looked up into a face I didn’t recognise, with dark intelligent eyes and sharp cheekbones. I was so flustered that when he said, “Are you Fen Munro?” I very nearly said, “No.”
But I nodded, and he said, “I’m James Sinclair.” He smiled at me, and his rather severe features were suddenly engaging. He said, “I had a meeting here and I wanted to drop in and thank you for your comments on the book. Well, both books. You were very diplomatic.”
“I wasn’t being diplomatic,” I said. “I really liked them.” I was doing my best not to stare at him. Then I winced inside; liked didn’t sound enthusiastic enough. I should have said I loved them.
He didn’t seem to mind. “Well, you were kinder than the copyeditor who worked on my first book, anyway.”
“That was probably Gen–” I began to say, before stopping myself. “I mean, Suzanne Caan, right? She’s a legend for her bluntness.”
He looked at me for a moment and then he grinned. “You were going to say Genghis, weren’t you?”
“Shhh,” I said urgently. Then I lowered my voice and said, “Yes.” There was something infectious about his amusement, but all the same, I really hoped he wouldn’t repeat the name to anyone else. “She’s alright – she’s just a little...”
“Brutal?” he suggested.
I bit my lip, trying not to laugh. “A bit.”
“I hope–” he started to say, but he was interrupted; someone put their head around the door and announced that his taxi had arrived.
“Got to go,” he said. “It was good to meet you, Fen.”
“It was nice to meet you too,” I said, but I’m not sure he even heard me; he was halfway out of the door already. I didn’t see him again for half a year.
Chapter Four
Sunlight is shining on my closed eyes. This time I wake from a true, deep and dreamless sleep to an orange glow behind my eyelids. I open my eyes and blink at the bright morning light.
I’ve been lying across the armchair in James’s study, with my head pressed against one of the padded wings and my legs over the armrest, bare feet dangling. I strongly suspect I have been sleeping with my mouth open, drooling a bit. Worse, the moment I start to move, I can feel various bits of my body protesting: my neck, my lower back, my right arm. Everything feels stiff.
Uncoiling myself slowly and painfully from the chair, I see the tin mug lying on its side on the floorboards. There is a sticky residue of brandy at its lip, though seemingly I managed to drink nearly all of it before I fell asleep.
Everything in the room – the chair, the mug, the small stain on the boards – is very clearly delineated by the strong light streaming through the gap in the curtains. I rub my eyes. I thought I’d drawn the curtains right across, wanting to shut out the unfriendly night. Apparently I didn’t. I drift over to the window, and pull them back, wincing at the sunshine.
Outside the window there is a strip of gravel path, a patch of earth that will eventually be a flower bed, and a fence. Beyond the fence is an expanse of rough pasture, stretching away to the treeline perhaps three hundred metres away. Now, at the very end of summer, the pasture is green and overgrown.
The land belongs to Barr Dubh House; it was one of the reasons we chose this place. We don’t have any livestock to graze on it, but it will be a wonderful buffer of peace and solitude, a perfect environment for James’s writing. It’s also an unimaginable luxury: a house with actual land. In London, I didn’t even have a window box. It’s still very hard to take in – the change in our lives, and everything that goes with it.
As I stare out of the window, my eye is drawn to movement at the treeline. It’s too far away for me to see clearly what it is. Not an animal, that’s for sure, although the solicitor who handled the sale of Barr Dubh to us told us we might see deer: I see a patch of colour that clearly isn’t fur.
Lilac, I think, and then: No, lavender. That’s the right name for that shade of light purple.
I squint at it. It must be a person, but I can’t quite work out what they’re wearing. Whatever it is, it’s voluminous: fabric seems to billow out from it, so that the movement seems to take the form of a series of surges. I briefly wonder if I’m seeing something other than a human figure – a piece of tarpaulin or tent fabric blowing in the wind? But there is no other movement; the trees and grass are unruffled.
A person then.
But whoever it is, it’s not as though they are wandering right past the house staring in through the windows. I watch for a few moments longer and the patch of lavender dwindles and vanishes. Presumably the person has stepped into the shadows under the trees. I wait, but they don’t reappear.
Maybe there’s a path over there. I make a mental note to go and have a look later. Then I turn away from the window and head for the kitchen. What I need right now is very hot, very strong, very sweet tea.
An hour later, I’m in the car, heading for the town. It’s not far in miles, but it takes longer than you’d think, because of all the twists and turns, not to mention the uneven road surface on the stretch between Barr Dubh House and the main road. There is also a triangular warning sign with a stag on it, galloping at full tilt. I have no idea how seriously to take this. Perhaps deer are as rare as yetis on the roads here, and the local council are just covering themselves. Or perhaps there is a real danger that I will come around a corner and find one charging across the road, tossing its antlered head at me. I go cautiously, just in case. I pass a few cars going the other way, to the town further up the valley. I also see a tractor with some terrifying-looking agricultural machinery attached to it. Mostly though, it’s just me following the serpentine route of the road, like a leaf borne downstream on a current. On one side of me are fields and a distant hill, and on the other, a forested slope. We have very few neighbours. There is hardly anyone at all living between us and the town.
Even when I get to the edge of the town, the place does not immediately open itself up to me. The first houses I pass are large Victorian mansions, set well back from the road in mature gardens with tall shrubs and hedges discouraging the idle gaze. The park with its jolly-looking bandstand seems deserted; I suppose by now the schools have gone back.
I park in the square with its dried-up fountain, a monumental creation of polished granite. I suspect this town had a heyday, and quite a lot of time has passed since then. But it’s still grand, in a faded sort of way. Most of the buildings around the square look as though they date to the nineteenth century, and even if at least one of them has what looks like a small shrub growing from the top of it, the balconies and pediments and bay windows are impressive.
I get out of the car and stand for a moment on the pavement, looking around me. In a year’s time, I suppose, this place will be as familiar to me as the London streets around my flat were. I will probably be on nodding terms with people I haven’t even met yet. At this point in time, however, I don’t know a single soul in the entire town. Even the solicitor was from Perth.
Anyway, pretty soon I’m going to have made my first introduction. I’m here on a mission. It takes me a minute to orient myself – I have no idea whether the High Street numbers run up or down the hill – but after that, it’s not difficult to find what I’m looking for. This isn’t a huge town, after all – there are two main streets and most of the shops are on one of them.
It’s a smart little boutique with glossy white paintwork and shiny windows, incongrously chic between two shabby-looking shops. McBryde’s says the fascia, and underneath in smaller letters: everything for your wedding. I wonder whether the name is really the proprietor’s, or simply a truly terrible attempt at humour. At any rate the window display is beautiful, showcasing a gorgeous gown with a fitted bodice and full skirt made of ivory raw silk, with a tartan sash across it in soft shades of blue, green and grey. The bride’s outfit is centre stage, but slightly behind it is a matching outfit for the groom, the kilt in the same tartan as the sash, and the sporran covered with silvery grey fur.
I look at these things, and for a moment I hesitate. James is the one with Scottish ancestry, after all; I feel like a bit of a fraud looking at tartan wedding gear.
The woman in the shop is reading a book when I come in. She puts it down before the door has even swung closed behind me, but with my bibliophile’s eye I’ve already noted that it’s a copy of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and an old one at that, with its orange and white cover design.
“I know,” she says, seeing me looking at it. “I should probably be reading Brides magazine or something.” She grins at me, her face freckled under a corona of russet curls. I warm to her already. “I’m Seonaid McBryde,” she tells me.
“Oh. So the shop is really–”
“Named after me, yes. My friend said I should go the whole hog and call the shop McBride’s with an i, but I thought that would be cheesy.” She puts her head on one side. “And what can I do for you?”
“I’m getting married next year.”
“Ooh, congratulations.” She sounds as though she means it, even though she must hear this from every single customer who comes in. “Are you getting married locally, then?”
“Yes,” I say, a little self-consciously. “We live here. Well, we do now. We’ve bought a house a couple of miles out of town.”
I end up telling her probably a lot more than she really wants to know, about our plans for Barr Dubh House and our old life in London and the jobs we haven’t entirely left behind but hope to carry on up here, with me freelancing rather than commuting to an office. James has only been away a few days and I’ve spoken to him, and to my best friend, Belle, on the phone, but I’ve missed having proper human contact.
“So your fiancé’s a writer?” asks Seonaid. “What’s his name? Maybe I’ve heard of him.”
“James Sinclair,” I say. “He wrote The Unrepentant–”
“The Unrepentant Dead?” Seonaid finishes for me. “Wow, so he’s that James Sinclair? He’s famous, then.”
“Not really,” I protest, but I’m quite pleased anyway on James’s behalf.
“I loved that book,” she says.
“Me too,” I tell her. “I mean, not just because he’s my fiancé. I worked on the book as a copyeditor before I even met him, and I thought it was amazing.”
“Please tell me you’re going to let me dress you and your bridesmaids,” said Seonaid. She grins. “There’s not another wedding dress supplier for twenty miles around, anyway.”
I laugh a little at that. “I’m only having one bridesmaid,” I tell her. “And we’re not having a huge wedding. We wanted something...” I think for a moment. “Understated but tasteful.”
It’s almost comical the extent to which her face falls at this. She says. “At least tell me you’re planning to wear a long white dress, and not a dove-grey trouser suit or something.”
“Not a trouser suit,” I say. “A dress. Maybe even a long dress. Only not white. White just makes me looked washed out. With my dark hair and eyes I just look like a vampire in it.”
“Ivory?” Seonaid suggests hopefully, but I shake my head.
“I was thinking of a more definite colour than that.”
She looks at me with a critical eye. “Blue? I could see you in blue. There are some styles that would look fabulous made up in cornflower blue.” She considers. “But what about your fiancé? Is he going to wear a kilt? We should check what colours the Sinclair tartan has.”
“Maybe,” I say. “We haven’t one hundred per cent decided about that.”
“I can check for you just in case,” she suggests. “You wouldn’t want to clash, after all.”
“Well actually,” I say, “I did have an idea about the colour.” It’s true, I did, and I might have had to think for a moment before putting a name to it, if I hadn’t seen something that exact shade already today. “I was thinking about lavender.”
There is a silence.
“Lavender?” Seonaid says slowly.
“Yes,” I say. “I love that colour. I guess it’s my favourite colour.” And I go rambling on about how it’s a little bit warmer than blue somehow, and it reminds me of the flower, and I love the smell of that too. Gradually I realise that Seonaid isn’t saying anything, and she isn’t nodding or smiling either. She looks perplexed.
“What?” I say. I raise my eyebrows. “Don’t you like lavender?” This surprises me, because I think any purple shade would look stunning on Seonaid herself, with her masses of Titian hair.
“No,” she says, “It’s not that.”
“You think it’s not my colour?” I can feel the warmth rising into my face.
“No, no,” she says quickly. “I think you’d look good in any shade of purple, and anyway, I’d never try to tell a customer what she should or shouldn’t choose. It’s just...” Her voice tails off.
“It’s just...?”
After another long pause, she says, “It’s unlucky.”
I stare at her. Unlucky?
Seonaid lets out a long sigh. “Look,” she says, “I know it’s totally illogical. It’s just superstition, right? But nobody likes that colour – you know...”
“Lavender,” I say flatly.
She nods. “I know it sounds completely nuts. And I mean, I could make you a dress that colour. I don’t keep fabric that colour here, but I could order it in. It’s just...it might not be comfortable for you. If you get married anywhere around here, and people see you, they’ll talk about it.”
I shake my head. “I’ve never heard of any superstition about getting married in that colour.”
“Well,” she says reluctantly, “I guess it’s kind of a local thing.”
For a few moments I cannot think of anything to say to this. We look at each other and it passes through my head that perhaps she is having a bit of fun at my expense. I’ve never heard of any shade of purple being unlucky, for a bride or for anyone else. Married in red, wish yourself dead, I’ve heard that one, not that I’d take any notice of it, if I really wanted a red dress. And then there’s Married in black, wish yourself back. But purple? I don’t think there’s even a rhyme for that one. Did she make it up, this local superstition?
Of course, I gave myself away as a newcomer the moment I opened my mouth, but then I went one better and told Seonaid all about my old life in London too. Maybe she thinks I’m just a daft townie with all sorts of romantic ideas about Scotland, ripe to believe any old nonsense.
“I guess I’ll have to rethink this,” I say awkwardly. “Thanks anyway.”
“I’ve offended you,” she says, looking stricken. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. Please don’t leave.”
I glance away, hesitating.
On the other side of the plate glass window, the autumnal sunshine is gilding the Victorian facade of the building opposite. A couple of older women are standing on the pavement chatting, in no particular hurry to go anywhere. One of them is accompanied by a black and white collie, which sits at her feet looking up hopefully. A red post van drifts past but otherwise the street is quiet.
This is a small town, where everyone knows everyone, where people look each other in the face and greet each other as they pass. That’s one of the reasons we came here, after all: because London, with its great mass of anonymous people, was stifling me. I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot here – the touchy incomer who can’t take a joke. The city girl with an inflated idea of her own importance. No; that’s not who I want to be.
Then my gaze falls on the battered copy of The Thirty-Nine Steps lying next to the till and that decides it for me.
“I’m not offended,” I tell Seonaid. “I’ve just never heard of lavender being unlucky before.” I do a good imitation of shrugging unconcernedly. “I could look at some other colours.”
She’s so pleased that any lingering feelings of pique melt away. Out come swatches of cloth in all different colours: oyster, champagne, eau-de-nil and other, stronger shades like raspberry and cornflower blue. She digs out a book of tartans too, and shows me two different Sinclair tartans: a red one and a blue ‘hunting’ one. I try and fail to imagine James in either of them, but it’s fun looking.
I’m in the shop a long time, but at the end I still haven’t come to any conclusions.
“I like the blue, and that very light green,” I tell Seonaid. “But I want to think about it.”
“Of course,” she says. “You shouldn’t rush it. It’s a big decision.”
All the same, I feel she is disappointed as she shows me out of the shop. She’s afraid I won’t come back because of what she said earlier and I can’t think what to say to reassure her. I get back into the car and drive back to Barr Dubh House. On the way I think about the colours she showed me, and how beautiful the fabrics were, like jewels.
But what I really wanted was lavender.
