Sands of Time

  She should have seen it coming. His distance from her; his smart new shirts of a bright hitherto untolerated colour, the change of aftershave and the rejection of her presents on his birthday. Nothing rude or unkind. It was just that they were quietly jettisoned at the back of his cupboard and never referred to again. She was glad he had not wanted to take the cats. Technically they were his but he said, trying to make a joke of it, that she could have custody. There was no place for cats in his new life. They, like her, had been rejected.

  And suddenly she no longer minded.

  She liked her new independence. And she liked Miles. A lot.

  But that did not mean she could not function without him. Never again was she going to allow herself to rely on anyone else. And it was a matter of pride that she should climb the footbridge alone.

  The storm had blown itself out next morning, and the sky was a delicate blue streaming with rags of crisp clean cloud. She parked the car in good time and stood staring at the old hotel. A new section of the tiles had been stripped off in the night and there was a gaping hole now, showing the stark roof ribs. Amongst the grey pigeons were a pair of exotic white doves, blown away from their home territory, slumming it happily with their cousins.

  Gripping her briefcase tightly she walked towards the bridge. There were several people waiting on the platform a lready and she could see a short queue at the ticket office as she set her foot on the first step.

  Halfway up she stopped, straining her ears. She could hear nothing but the wind, barely more than a breeze now, soughing gently in the tangled hedge on the far side of the line. Glancing over the parapet at the old hotel she could see the white birds clearly on the roof. They seemed unperturbed, preening in the sunshine, sheltered from the wind by the chimney stacks.

  She moved on, reached the top, walked slowly across the bridge and then began to descend.

  ‘Chloë, dear!’ The oh-so female voice behind her was loud and very real. ‘Going up to town? How lovely. We can travel together.’

  Glancing round, Chloë caught sight of the two white doves, in the distance, wheeling now above the station. She smiled at the owner of the voice, a woman she usually tried to avoid, and resigned herself to an inquisition from which there would be no escape. At least it would deflect the disappointment which she realised suddenly she was feeling that there had been no voices in her head, no music floating in the sky above the hotel.

  The business dinner, the result of the prompt personal delivery of the sketches, had been unavoidable and because of it she had to catch the last train. When she at last stepped out of the empty carriage the ticket office was closed as she had known it would be. There was no one else on the platform.

  The footbridge rose against the starry sky, a black silhouette in the total silence. The lonely station light did no more than throw pools of black shadow under its high arch.

  Her briefcase tightly clasped in one hand Chloë took a deep breath and walked towards it. The steps between its walls formed a canyon of darker black. The one light at the top of the stairs had long ago been broken by vandals, the damaged fitting left to rust. Almost without realising it she was straining her ears for voices; for music from the hotel across the tracks, but the night was perfectly silent save for the call of an owl in the fields on the far side of the lane.

  Resolutely she put her foot on the lowest step of the bridge. Her mouth had gone dry, and she told herself not to be a fool. What, after all, was there to be afraid of? A voice? The echo of running feet? Some nameless tragedy from the past which had barely touched the history of time.

  She had taken two more steps up when she heard in the distance the rumble of a train. She froze, listening. The tracks had begun to whisper behind her.

  Mary, my darling, wait. Let me explain.

  She glanced up ahead, suddenly wishing she had brought a torch. The darkness of the steps between the walls was impenetrable.

  She could hear the wheels now as the train reached the viaduct, their note hollow, inexorable, and above it the snorting of the steam.

  Mary.

  The footsteps were so close she flinched and ducked back against the wall. Turning she fled back onto the platform. Her hands were shaking as, her resolution gone, she pulled her mobile phone from her bag.

  Please let him be in. ‘Miles? I’m at the station. Please come.’

  Switching it off she slipped it into her pocket, her eyes on the bridge. He had not questioned her. There had been no recriminations that she had come alone as once Edmund would have done. She stiffened. Had that been the flash of a pale skirt she saw out of the corner of her eye at the top of the flight? Holding her briefcase in her arms, across her chest like a shield, she slipped around the corner of the small ticket office and pressed close against the cold wall.

  The train was getting closer. On the bridge the shadows grew if anything more black.

  Mary.

  His voice was very faint this time.

  Mary, my darling, forgive me.

  Her mouth dry, Chloë peered around the corner. The car park was silent. Please hurry, Miles. Please hurry.

  But it wasn’t Miles who needed to hurry. If only she knew the young man’s name.

  The sound of the train was louder now. The hollow ring of the wheels changed note as it passed across the viaduct and reached the solid ground. It was coming very close.

  Mary, wait.

  Chloë could hear running footsteps. They were coming across the bridge. Mary, my darling, listen.

  White petticoats frothed in the darkness, descending the stairs and suddenly Chloë could hear a woman’s broken sobs near her, on the platform.

  Mary.

  His voice was still on the bridge, far away. The noise of the steam engine was deafening. Pressing her hands over her ears, Chloë closed her eyes.

  In the lane the car broke all speed limits as it tore towards the station forecourt and came to a halt. The door opened and Miles leaped out, leaving the engine running and the headlights shining full across the track.

  ‘Chloë,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t move. Don’t go near the edge. I’m coming!’

  She didn’t hear him. Her eyes were on the rails.

  ‘Mary,’ she whispered. ‘Please, don’t do it. Listen to him. Believe him.’

  ‘Chloë!’ The whole bridge vibrated to Miles’s heavy footsteps as he ran.

  Chloë had dropped her case. She took a step forward. ‘Mary!’ she called.

  She could see her quite clearly. The pale face, the dark curly hair, the dark dress and heavy, long coat, pulled straining across the huge belly. And the eyes. The huge eyes, blank with despair. For a moment the two women stood facing each other as the train drew into the station with a scream of wheels on metal.

  ‘Chloë!’

  Mary.

  As Miles grabbed her shoulders and swung her away from the edge of the platform Chloë caught a momentary glimpse of the young man who had thrown his arms around Mary and dragged her away. He was tall, his face shadowed beneath his cap. And then they had gone. The platform was empty and suddenly, shockingly, silent. There was no train. Never had been a train. Only the wind soughing across the fields and the lonely call of the peewits disturbed the night.

  Chloë was trembling as she clung to Miles. ‘It was all right. He saved her. Perhaps we saved her.’ She found she was sobbing gently. ‘That was why it wasn’t news. There was a happy ending.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ He smiled down at her. ‘Come on. Let’s take you home. We’ll come and get your car in the morning.’

  As they climbed back over the bridge Chloë glanced over the parapet towards the hotel. Lights spilled out of the doors across the grass and in the distance she could hear the cheerful notes of a honky tonk piano. She stopped.

  ‘Can you hear that?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And see the lights?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘Do you think they lived happily ever after?’

  Sh
e needed him to say yes, but he laughed.

  ‘Oh, my darling sweet romantic. And I thought you were a hard-boiled business woman! No, I don’t suppose they did. They probably had happy bits and sad bits. I expect they quarrelled and they made up and they had four or five children and lived to become fat and staid and boring. But I expect he always remembered that passionate wild gesture of hers, and she always remembered that he saved her life, whatever it was he had done before. And that was the secret they never told their children and they never spoke of again. A secret which when it happened caused them both to feel such pain and such fear that it was imprinted on time itself. I think that is what ghosts are. They are not the spirits of dead people; they are emotions so intense, so raw, so deeply felt that they become locked into the place where they happened and sometimes, if the time is right, other people see and hear them.’

  He took her hand and tucked it under his arm. To her surprise she did not move it.

  ‘Come on, I can feel a philosophical drink by the fire is in order,’ he said firmly. ‘Will you let me drive you home and propose a toast to Mary and her Joe.’

  ‘How do you know his name?’

  Below them the car park was suddenly dark. The music had stopped and the wind was blowing through empty, ruined rooms.

  ‘I don’t. I guessed.’ He smiled. ‘Come on, my dear. Let’s go home.’

  Party Trick

  ‘Have you ever tried dowsing?’ Morgan Conway looked across at Pippa and smiled.

  He had arrived to spend the weekend at the cottage with her and Colin, but now Colin was out on call, attending a calving two miles away, leaving them facing each other over cups of strong coffee, running out of small talk after only a few minutes. The trouble was that Colin had told her nothing about their unexpected guest. ‘We were at school together. Lives in London. Nice chap.’ And that was all, for God’s sake! Nothing about where he had been up to now and why she hadn’t met him before. Things were difficult enough between her and Colin at the moment. They had only lived here a few months and she loved the cottage, but unable to find a job, any job, let alone the busy administrative post she’d had before, she was as bored as he was happy and fulfilled in the new practice.

  Their latest row was a direct result of her own personal angst. It had been about babies. Why not? Colin had said. The implication being that it would give her something to do; something to fill her time; keep her out of mischief. Her anguished refusal even to contemplate having a child had appalled him and their quarrel had escalated terrifyingly. Her misery at his apparent lack of understanding, at the crassness of the timing of the suggestion, made her say things she didn’t mean – that she never wanted children, that a baby would be an admission of defeat, that there were enough children in the world already.

  Since the argument a couple of days ago they had barely spoken. It was not a good time to try and entertain a stranger.

  Except, perhaps sensing her hostility and her embarrassment, he was obviously intending to entertain her.

  ‘By dowsing, you mean water divining?’ She stood up and went to the stove. This would be her third cup – he had declined her offer of a refill – and already her nerves were jumping.

  He glanced at her, noting the smartly cut blonde hair, the intense blue eyes, the tight nervous smile. She was good looking, Colin’s wife, but obviously highly strung and, if he was any judge, utterly miserable.

  He nodded. ‘It’s my party trick. Weekends in the country with vets and doctors. They take one look at me and retreat immediately to deal with emergencies leaving me with their poor wives who would much rather be out shopping with their friends.’

  She was glad she had her back to him, to hide her confusion. Was she that transparent? Well, he was wrong about one thing: she had no friends down here yet. None at all.

  When she turned, coffee pot in hand, he was watching her, his eyebrow raised. He had a nice face, kind, rugged, if a bit lopsided, and she realised as she met his gaze, he wasn’t teasing. He was perfectly serious about his party trick. ‘Have you got any wire coat hangers?’

  She produced them and watched while he bent, snapped and twisted them into two right-angled rods.

  ‘OK. Here’s where I earn my lunch. What have you lost?’

  ‘Lost?’

  He nodded. ‘Engagement ring? Wedding ring?’ So, he had noticed the bare third finger of her left hand. A silly gesture, taking it off. They had got married, hadn’t they, and they weren’t divorced. Not yet. ‘Have you mislaid your car keys? Rolex? Pension book?’ He stood up holding the rods loosely in front of him. They remained still, but she had the feeling that they were quivering slightly like dogs waiting for a command. The idea made her smile.

  Sitting down again she found she had relaxed for the first time since he had arrived. ‘If you’re serious, I lost a little gold cross soon after we moved here. My godmother gave it to me and it really upset me. I searched everywhere.’

  He nodded. Moving away from the table he held the rods out in front of him. ‘OK. Let’s ask a few questions.’ He concentrated for a moment, then addressed the rods. ‘Is the cross in the house?’

  The two bent coat hangers quivered and sprang apart.

  He glanced up at Pippa. ‘Which room? We’ll ask one by one. Tell me what rooms you have.’

  Within seconds they had established that the cross was – according to the rods – in the small conservatory behind the kitchen.

  ‘But that’s ridiculous. I never took it in there!’ Pippa found she wanted desperately for him to be right. She had never seen this done before and it intrigued her enormously. Once when she was a child, her grandfather had shown her and her sisters how to dowse for water, walking up and down the back lawn with a hazel twig in his hands. It was a bit like that. He had found the main water pipe into the house but they had all known it was there anyway and so they had not been impressed.

  ‘Is it in the flower beds?’ Morgan asked the rods.

  No.

  ‘Pots?’

  No.

  ‘What else is there?’ he asked Pippa. It was as though he were interpreting at a conference – or a police enquiry.

  ‘Paving stones?’

  No.

  ‘Plants, I suppose. Perhaps they ate it!’

  Her frivolous remark did not even need to be relayed. The rods sprang apart.

  Yes!

  ‘OK. Which plant?’ Morgan was frowning with concentration.

  ‘Geranium.’

  No.

  ‘Busy Lizzie?’

  No.

  ‘Cactus?’

  No.

  ‘Oleander?’

  YES!

  She laughed. ‘Oh please! Not possible. Those skimpy old things at the back? This I have to see!’

  They made their way into the conservatory, leaving the rods on the kitchen table. It wasn’t really a conservatory worth the name, just a small glassed-in area behind the kitchen, smelling strongly of damp earth and rotting flowers, the mossy paving stones only a pace or two long and scarcely that wide. In the corner a pile of old clay pots spilled out stale dried earth. From one a pretty fern arched over a discarded trowel.

  Against the back wall of the house there was a small bed in which were a dozen or so straggly geraniums and behind them two tall oleanders, their dusty leaves eclipsed by cascades of red flowers.

  ‘We should take care of this place better.’ Pippa stood beside Morgan, staring ruefully at the plants. ‘They survive in spite of me, poor things. I never even water them. It’s Colin who looks after the garden when he’s got time, which isn’t often. He’s practically never here.’ She reached up to remove a dried shrivelled flower and gave a faint gasp. Entangled in the stem was a fine gold chain. ‘I don’t believe it!’ Cautiously she unwound it and in seconds the cross was in her hand. The chain had broken near the clasp. ‘It must have caught as I walked by and then the plant grew and carried it up with it!’ She looked at Morgan in astonishment. ‘You’ve earned you
r lunch! Is it always so accurate? What else can we ask it? Who taught you to do it?’

  He sighed. Always the same questions. Always the same curiosity. The trouble was, this particular party trick had the potential to end in tears. The rods never lied. The temptation to ask the unaskable was too great. Perhaps he shouldn’t have started this.

  ‘It’s all right, Morgan.’ Pippa had read him like a book. ‘I won’t ask you about Colin. I suspect I already know the answer. She’s the receptionist at the practice. And the strange thing is, if it’s true I don’t think I’m going to mind that much. Not any more. Not after our last quarrel.’ They moved out of the conservatory onto the small back lawn. ‘I suppose we never really loved each other. Not properly.’ Her face was wistful. She had loved Colin. She still did. But she was not about to tell his friend that. ‘It was wishful thinking. For both of us,’ she ploughed on, ‘but moving here, I think, crystallised things. We saw more clearly. We couldn’t hide things from each other any more. It was as if the house was some kind of catalyst. It had such a lovely atmosphere and we were somehow spoiling it.’

  ‘That’s sad. What will you do?’

  She shrugged. ‘Move out, I suppose. Go our separate ways. With no hard feelings, though. I hope we’ll stay friends. We won’t embarrass you with screaming rows or anything like that while you’re here, I promise.’

  Morgan raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘I’d like to know about the house, though.’ She turned to look at it thoughtfully. It was a pretty cottage, smothered in late roses, small windows opened to let in the autumn sunlight and warm grass-scented air, the old clay tiles a faded red, touched here and there with lichen. ‘I think someone who lived here knew about love,’ she said so quietly he had to strain to hear her. ‘Is that something you could ask your coat hangers?’

  For a moment he didn’t respond, staring at the cottage in silence. Then at last he nodded.